Art & Craft

Painting seems to be the up and coming pastime for youths. Think Artestique, My Art Space... seeing my friends post their masterpieces on fb, I wondered how come everyone seems to know how to draw so brilliantly!

At those weekly Art & Craft lessons in primary and secondary school, they aren't my favourite lessons nor have I been the brightest student. However, I've always wanted to try my hands at painting too, curious to know how far my limited creativity and artistic talent will bring me. 

So one day, Celeste got a pair of Groupon deals for Kepler Art studio for a 3-hour painting session (with teacher). 3 months after we purchased the tickets, we finally found ourselves in a small classroom with a blank white canvas in front of us, several brushes and bottles of paint.

The teacher was a young lady, maybe in her mid 20s? We were to choose a picture from an album and that would be what we would be drawing for the next 3 hours!

I chose what caught my eye in the first instance - nature, greenery, sakura flowers, blue sky:

HAHAHA, looking at the myriad and layers of colours, I think it was gonna be really tough!

Being my first time, I really was clueless of what I should start with. I thought the first 15 mins could have been spent on a short intro on painting - you know, the material, basics of mixing colours, background foreground, highlighting etc etc? Anyway, 'cher told me to start sketching with a pencil.

The most I could sketch was the hillscape, the fence and the tree branch. Then, cher told me to start filling in the sky. She mixed a nice light blue colour and I did the filling up of the huge white space. I learnt that I could correct the colours by applying a second, third, layer. For example, if the blue sky was too dark, all I needed was to dip the brush into white paint and apply over the blue.

After the blue sky was done, the yellowish/orangy/red tint sky was the next challenge. Apply technique 1 as mentioned above.

My status now:

Still looking barren, with yet half the work done!

So light yellowish green would be the filler for the base for the foreground, the hill and grass. "Start with the lightest colours first," says cher.

Using a different type of brush and stroke, cher taught how to create the vertical strokes to mimic the tall grass. As you can see from the first picture (top), there would be many layers to the grass, tall grass, flowers, shadows, grains etc, and cher helped me mix the colours and showed the strokes to create the impression -and I was left to myself to do the rest.

The sakura leaves were the most interesting. When cher demonstrated, her every simple dap of the brush seem to grow a pretty pink leave on the branches. When I took over, every dap of my brush looked deliberate and rough, almost like a smear, a drag. Fortunately, the purposely strokes were to be concealed by the next layers of red, pink and white.

After 3-hours, our final product!

Cher complimented that my drawing didn't seem like I was a first-timer, haha, thanks cher, but it was all credit to your help!

Another KPI for the year, cleared! :D