Still Life with Pears and Copper Kettle

Still Life with Pears and Copper Kettle

Painted at Lakeside during a still life class I taught in August. I love the glass reflections and of course pears are my favorite fruit to paint.

Week Five of Our Painting Class

I've been leading some painting classes on Tuesday nights and last week we painted a rooster. To everyone's surprise, including my own, it was an easy piece. All bright colors, mostly primary, and keeping an eye out for the major value change on the bird's neck.

Acrylic Painting Class in Bryan

I'm doing a four week painting class in Bryan and we started off all painting the same thing. I did a Powerpoint presentation showing the painting step-by-step and gave them some info on color and how to block in and we were off an running. Next week they get to choose from flowers or a landscape. I like to have them all do the same thing the first night so I can get an idea of how much experience they have. The subject was a rowboat with Ocracoke Lighthouse int he background. Everyone did quite well!

My version of the painting we did is below.

Composition and Simple Subjects

I teach a few art classes and workshops every year so I am always trying to come up with "easy" ways to approach simple subjects. I use these exercises for the first class to give everyone a bit of confidence. It's my firm opinion that a painter with confidence and a big brush will create a better painting than a hesitant painter with a small brush (or any size brush).

Fruits and other organic subjects are deceptively simple subjects. I still have these pears because we haven't munched our way through them yet and I never get tired of doing still life paintings. So I set up another composition using my favorite fruit and did a quick 45 minute study this morning. It was important to be able to paint this quickly because I want the students to be able to start and finish their piece in one 2 hour session. I usually give them a photograph of the finished painting so they can see how my version turned out and a choice of photographs of the still life set up. I begin the class with a 15 minute demonstration on how to approach the painting, leaving them with a couple hours to do their piece.

The first class in this session starts Tuesday, October 2 at the Bryan Community Center on Buffalo Road in Bryan, Ohio. Classes will be held from 6-8:30 PM for four consecutive Tuesdays. Contact Cindy Rau at crau@cityofbryan.net to register for the classes or obtain more information. This is an oil or acrylic class and there is a $30 supply fee payable to me the first night of class.

Perfect Pears

6" x 6"

Sometimes I will check the composition using the "THRESHOLD" function

in Photoshop, which reduces the values to black and white and creates a simulated ink drawing.

If the black areas match my initial block in I know I have

remained faithful to the initial concept. I was pretty close with this one.