Art with Grace

This is Grace. She is my sweet 13 year old cousin.

We do art lessons together every other thursday.

Grace is a natural when it comes to art. She makes sure to keep in practice and challenge herself. I have seen her grow so much artistically over the years and I am so proud!

Yesterday, I decided to honor the Fall even though it has been 98 degrees around here. And I also decided to throw a twist on the usual paintings that we do. Instead of starting with a white canvas, we started with a peach, burnt orange canvas. Then we drew out our object and just filled in the dark and light colors. Our main color was already there so we were focusing mainly on shadow and light. Our reference photo was a autumn maple leaf. This picture shows me in the process of painting.

Here is my finished product in the below photo. Amazingly this took two hours. One of the coolest things that teaching art lessons has taught me is how you can make art as quick as you want. I used to feel like I couldn't get a painting out without spending a week on it. Now I know you just have to simplify and prioritize. For example, if you want a painting done in 2 hours you would choose a simple subject matter, smallish canvas and looser painting style.

 This is one of the ways that my art students and I can finish a wall worthy painting in one lesson. Grace's Leaf turned out great as well! I was so proud that it looked awesome and she did great on her shadow and light values.

I hope to slowly convince people that art is not just for professed artists, but anyone can make something they love and have fun doing it. All that is needed is inspiration.