The neophyte at work

A week or two ago I posted a picture of my first painting, which I did while taking my first actual art class. Sadly my class is over, but I'm so inspired by how much I enjoyed the class and the process of painting those pears, that I've begun a second painting that I'm now doing all on my own here at home. And this time, I've decided to document the progress of the painting as I go.

It began with a trip to the grocery store, to buy fruit, which I then arranged on a serving dish, which I then placed on top of an empty cardboard box that was sitting on the floor in the room in my house that I call my "study" because it's sort of a random room where I hang out a lot and where my computer is and where most of my books are and a tv too, and which is where I've been doing all my painting since I started this class. Here is a photo of the fruit as I arranged it at one point (it went through multiple arrangements):



So I sketched that with a pencil onto a canvas that I had started to use for something else but that I had then taken a lot of the paint off of because I didn't like that something else, and so the canvas was left covered with shades of yellow and green. But I didn't sketch it exactly as it looked, because I had to make some adjustments so that I could draw something that would fit onto my canvas (esp. since I added a bottle of wine to the drawing too), (also, I adjusted the positions of the fruit several times between that picture above and the final sketch, so there's that difference too), and this is what I came up with (if you can make out this crappy picture):



Then I used some brown paint that I mixed up and a small brush to go over the outline of my sketch, then I started filling in my very first layer of paint on everything, just to get it started, and that is where I am now, and this is how it looks right now:



It will not look like this when I'm done, b/c I'm going to change the colors a lot as I go and play with it as I go, like I did with the pears, which started out as three solid yellow blobs; and I'll probably try to get rid of the harsh brown outline that I've started with by the end of it all, but there you go.

This painting stuff is good therapy, btw, I tell you what. SO GLAD I started this new hobby; it actually makes me feel relaxed when I get home from work and start doing this. I get into a zone ... a really cool, relaxed, focused-yet don't-care-if I-screw-up-because-this-is-just-for-fun kind of zone, and it's awesome.