Art School!

 All up I’ll be doing two and a half weeks of painting classes with The Florence Studio, with the wonderful artist and teacher Laura Thompson. 

First day of school, complete with backpack - I was pretty excited!

Day 1 was a lovely day of learning art theory (including relative colour, which was a new topic for me), and setting things up. It became clear pretty quickly that my “I’ll pack really light so I can take more art supplies” plan had backfired, when I realised I didn’t have any clothes to paint in (ooops) - so we headed to the “workwear” store for Florence & I grabbed some chef’s pants & shirt, so I can paint and not stress too much about my clothes.

Whilst I’m here I’ll be painting a master copy of “The Girl With the Pearl Earing” by Johannes Vermeer, as it is a really good example of renaissance style portrait painting. I’ve done tonal some studies of this painting before, but I know I’ll learn an enormous amount from doing it in colour.

In the studio <3 

This is where I’m up to on Day 3. Day 1 was copying the drawing onto the canvas, Day 2 was tinting the darks, and then putting a first layer on the background and the coat, Day 3 was putting another layer on the background and another layer on the dark of the coat, then the first layer on the rest of the coat and the scarf. At this point I’m just putting in big shapes & vague colours - the most important thing is to get the shapes and the tones right. I’m happy with most of it, but will make changes on the next pass.

Part of today was learning how to mix in the medium (Winsor & Newton Liquin Fine Detail) & learning how to mix the colours that I want from the paint - this is new to me, as I have a small amount of experience mixing colours (thanks to Michael Armstrong, my wonderful art teacher back in Australia), but I’m needing a lot more practice. 

This process works in big shapes then moving down to finer shapes and details, as well as working from the dark colours into the lighter colours. The painting itself will have many layers of paint, each refining the layer below it. Tomorrow I’ll have my first go at trying to mix skin tones and start painting the face.

Laura is an amazing teacher. & I’m thrilled I’ve been able to have her teach me in person after having watched her youtube videos

The studio has a bunny! Leo (Leonardo) is a definite character and likes to come and check on our work. Unfortunately this means Skye can’t come to class with me, but Stephen is very kindly looking after her whilst I go paint each morning (my class is 10-1, then it is home for lunch and a nap, because painting is fun, but exhausting).

Every day in the studio is a good day <3 

Every morning we catch the bus to the studio, which is quite close to the Ponte Vecchio, which gives us a lovely view during our walk together.