Watercolor Class - Roosters, Chickens and Chicks

I finished up my latest watercolor class a few weeks ago but I'm having computer problems which makes it difficult to do a blog post. My HP computer keeps overheating and then just shuts down. Rocketman is going to take a look at it to hopefully fix this problem.

Back to watercolor class, this class session was on chickens. These are a few paintings done by my teacher.

I decided to do a painting on chicks. I thought it would be the easiest but I still found it quite intimidating.

Here is my finished painting. Not too terrible but I still have a long way to go. I have another sumi-e class in another couple of weeks along with training to become a Reiki Master. I'm so excited about that.

 

Also, we drive to the airport in a few hours to pick up Hannah from Korea. Hellena was suppose to come too but she fainted in Korea and needs to stay for tests. She is pretty bummed but said her next vacation she will come here. She seems to always get ill when she visits Korea and I hope it's nothing serious. She currently lives in Qatar and is a flight attendant.

 

Rocketman is taking the week off although I told him that we will be doing a lot of shopping but he doesn't mind at all.  Have a restful Memorial Day weekend everyone!

Watercolor Class - Irises and Poppies

 

I finished my latest watercolor class and this is how my iris came out. I still need to do some touchup but it turned out better than I thought it would.

I also started a second painting with poppies.

I noticed on the morning following our latest 9 inch of snow a couple of weeks ago, a bunch of robins having a feeding frenzy in my crabapple tree. They were scarfing down rotten crabapples like they were starving and I'm sure they were since our ground was covered with all that snow, making worms hard to come by.

                          I grabbed my point and shoot camera and took these pictures.

 

                    They were even eating ones that other robins had knocked to the ground.

Watercolor Classes - Irises and Other Flowers

I'm back to taking classes at the White Bear Center for the Arts. Last week I started a class with Sylvia Benson.  She took sumi-e classes with me a few years ago. I had also taken a watercolor koi class taught by her last year.

She brought tons of photos for us to choose from as inspiration. This got me thinking so I talked to Rocketman about visiting some botanical gardens with his fancy camera and shooting some flower photos for me. He said that he would love to. But these are the photos I chose.

Next came sketching out the composition. It took me what felt like forever to sketch one iris along with a bud.

This is how the first 2 1/2 hour class went. Now I'm wishing I would have started with a much smaller flower. The hugeness of it is really intimidating me. I have class tomorrow and one more next week.

Here is a quick photo of Sylvia helping a fellow student. She is so patient and kind. I really wish I could take her home with me.

Today was our first day in the 70's since October and, if you are counting, it has been six months. We had steaks on the grill and it was glorious!