Getting Ready For The Las Vegas Painting Convention

A close friend volunteered to be a guinea pig when he realized I had never taught a painting class before.  He is willing to have me teach him how to paint a painting, one of the two I will be teaching at the Las Vegas Painting Convention. My class,  #509 held in the conference center of the Tropicana Center on Tuesday, Feb. 26th will be my first. He pointed out that he has NEVER painted before so whatever problems I encounter with him ought to serve me well in Vegas. We shall see. I wonder if you CAN teach someone to paint in a style that is pretty shaky. It is a lovely painting but can someone else paint it too? I do know that in recording the work on my current painting, a study of a cactus plant with a single flower, it IS incredibly hard to just paint a subject let alone teach someone else to paint what you are struggling with. Each artist has their own style.

Dragging my feet getting ready, his offer forced me to get my act together and man, is it a lot of work! First off I realized that I didn't have very good notes on how I painted the painting. In fact if anything they are non-existent. What was I thinking of? Luckily I had taken a few photos with my old iPhone 3s but other than that and the original in my hot little hands, I didn't have much else. Today I made a copy of the outlines using tracing paper on the original and went over to Office Depot to have them copy those for the kits I will have to provide everyone in my class. I too will use these templates to put the outlines on our canvases for our own painting session.

The instructions are a work in progress. Seriously. I really have no idea on how to proceed other than the old dictum of dark to light, the mantra of oils. I didn't record the paints I used though I have a good idea of what they were. And the brushes. Well, I did use much the same type of brush in my other painting, an acrylic painting of a Bird of Paradise so that should be easy, or not. Tomorrow will be the proof of the pudding. I like filberts so that part should be easy. Use #2, #4, and whatever else is bigger.

We agreed to block out four hours, the same amount of time I will have in Las Vegas. If we can't get it done in that time, I will have to re-think the steps. However, I feel that once the outline is on the canvas, it shouldn't take more than 30 minutes to paint the black background. Since it is acrylic it will dry fast. Then we start with the oils. There is a VERY limited palate so other than blending, not an easy thing for crafters (why use one or two paints when you can use 10?), I really think that we should be done in much less time. But, we may not. Tomorrow we will find out.

Wish us luck!