A dear friend in Seattle gifted me beginner acrylic painting classes. I love oils, but they sounded so complicated! With lengthy drying times! And arcane processes! Acrylic painting sounded – easier. But not, you know, *easy*. Hence the classes, from Lonni Flowers.
There were about a dozen of us – a good mix of ages and genders. The classroom at UW was a bit small, but well-lit. Lonni offered starter packs of paint/ brushes/ canvas for a token fee. I gladly took the offer. Much of the first session was about color blending: we worked with only three colors, red, blue and yellow – and white. No black, we’d have to mix our own. Then we started work on the already-prepared 8 x 10 canvases. She wanted us to paint sea and sky, and offered a bunch of photographs as inspiration. I picked up one, but then decided to just paint the sky out the window, and add sea from my memory.
This was the picture I brought home at the end of Day 1. “Very calm,” said my friend (who was kindly keeping me company in the class.) Homework was to complete the painting before the next session, next week.
“Maybe I’ll add a dragon,” I said.
It was calm. Reasonably artistic. But… it was too calm. Boring (I mean, for me. I’d admired pictures in the same vein. It just wasn’t what I wanted to paint. Too minimalist.)
So… I tried composing some other ideas. One that I tried (just in Microsoft Paint) was “Haunts.” It was meant as just an inspiration, but I could use the idea and the composition. It had a sort of eerie-Magritte vibe, and maybe I will actually paint it some day.
But it was still too minimalist… I really wanted a dragon. At first I thought I’d paint a golden dragon, to go with the relatively soft grey-blues of the picture. But when I tried, the yellow didn’t cover the blue. It was a see-through yellow dragon. So I added red and brown. And expanded the dragon. Added a rocky shoreline with algae. Then I found the sky looked too blue for the colors I had, so I added some grey and green for a moodier look.
After I’d done all that, I wanted something interesting in the bottom left of the painting to balance the dominant dragon. I painted a pile of golden eggs, two of which were hatching, and some hatchlings swimming in the water. When I took it back to class, I realized the eggs looked like the dragon’s hoard. Using reptilian eggs/ hatching photos from Google Images, I redid the eggs. Now I think they do look like eggs. At some point, I will probably redo the hatchlings in the water. I’m not happy with them.
It’s been a lot of fun. Later, I’ll post about the second class.
(Copyright 2019)
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KEYAN BOWES 
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