Psst- the teacher isn’t looking. 🤡 🌅 Get your phone and post your favorite pic. Drop it in the comments below. __________________________________ 👆🏻Cliff Notes Version 👇🏻 A little more detail. The why 👉🏻 In LESSON 1, _________________________ The amount of detail we put into realism paintings simply isn’t stored in your brain. Not yet… and honestly, maybe not ever. That is NORMAL! The first lesson is in classroom HERE After you read the lesson, find 1 or 2 or even 3 images that mean something special to you. They do NOT have to be images you plan to paint. Think of it as building your inspiration library for this entire community. Later, we will VOTE on the one to paint in class. Drop it. What makes that image so special to you?

I don't know about any of you, but I usually think of other people's photos when I think of reference photos. But I realized something. In my Dropbox, I have years worth of photos I took of places I've been, things I have enjoyed, and I don't mind giving myself artistic permission to draw or paint what I took photos of. I know that there might be some things to be careful of, like a floral arrangement or anything someone else did artistically that I took a photo of. Still I've spent the last few hours downloading several images to my phone that I can use later this month. I had to share, since I was truly surprised by what I found lurking in my photo archive. I don't grow flowers. I would think it weird if someone gave me flowers. However, our family visited the botanical gardens so I have fun photos of flowers and butterflies. Watercolor flower paintings might just happen this month. Plus a fun fog on the lake picture begging me to paint it.

My studio is a disaster and currently looks like: 🫯 Amazon exploded 🫯 my trash can puked a unicorn 🫯 unfinished paintings everywhere 🫯 cords trying to strangle me 🫯 and Mini Me is currently buried in papers with only her little feet sticking out 😂 (can you find her?) This is NOT the beautifully curated artist studio people imagine or that I usually share with you. I am walking the walk here. This is: 📍 creating 📍 experimenting 📍 teaching 📍 filming 📍 building kits 📍 repainting 📍 thinking 📍 trying new things 📍 working hard I think creativity is often a little messy but I don’t always work this way. I do think of myself as more organized in my brain than this temporary chaos that you see here. Honestly, it’s a little uncomfortable for me to share this with you. So now I want to see YOUR imperfect thing this week. Your space, A project Even a conversation Something from this week that is: 🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟 🫟 🫟 Crooked 🫟 Weird 🫟 Half finished 🫟 Burnt 🫟 Messy 🫟 Chaotic 🫟 Barely held together with spite 🫟 🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟 We start with being ok with messy imperfections. Drop your imperfect thing below. You can do this.

The 8.5x11 are me following a book. She drew it and I paint in between the lines. She also tells me rough percentage of color mixtures to get the colors right. The rest is free hand afterwards.

Again I cheated. I took my sunflower into Grok Imagine and had it expand the negative space. First two attachments. And then I cropped one. Third image. What do you think of the final - third - image?