As I mentioned in the previous post, this week marked the second week in what I hope will become a long-term project: a weekly painting class at the Carriage Factory Gallery.

So far, my student is getting a very good deal on one-on-one instruction. Although I have to admit that I’m getting my fair share of instruction, as well. There is nothing like teaching something to really learn it!

The class was designed to be a guided independent study of the use of oil paints or colored pencils in classical techniques because those are the areas that I do best.

But my student is most familiar with acrylics and is more interested in the use of color than in creating representational art (which is where my expertise lies).

So yesterday’s class combined her interest in colors and acrylics with glazing techniques and we spent the class period pushing paint around, creating washes and glazes and just generally having fun. The three pieces shown here are my efforts for the day. They began as watercolor washes, but acrylic glazes worked very well over the watercolor. I was surprised at how little the watercolor layers were disturbed.

I stayed behind at the gallery after class was over and put in 90 minutes on the large pastoral I’m currently working. Time seemed to fly (it always does when I paint) and when I finally had to stop because I was resting my hand in fresh paint, a lot of progress had been made.

This painting is a revisit to a theme from this spring’s Grand National Rodeo Western Art Show & Sale. One of the small paintings I sent to that show was Dinner With Friends, which is an 8×10 and was painted in the classical style. A full work-in-progress of the study is available on my web site.

I have liked that image and the idea it evoked from the first time I saw the reference photo, but, as usually happens, the finished painting fell so far short of the image in my mind’s eye that I have considered reworking it more than once. Then a friend suggested I use the 8×10 image as a study and create a full-sized painting based on it. What a great idea!

The size has been tripled from 8×10 to 24×30 and the under painting is in progress.

And there are already some compositional changes. One of the horses has changed color, for example, and I think another may follow suit. Less certain is turning another horse around to face into the painting plane instead of out of it.

But the most fun is in being able to work all those areas in the background that were simply too small to address in the study. Some of them have been painted over a couple of times already, but every session brings improvement and that is always welcome!

©Copyright 2008 by Carrie Lewis. See original post here.
To learn more about this artist, visit Carrie Lewis’s website.