Art.

    I recently took up a new hobby: Acrylic painting.

    As a certified word nerd (TM) and grammar-stickler, this isn't something I ever really thought I'd do. I've lived my whole life comfortably within the bounds that I Don't Art, because I Can't Art.

    Then I went to preschool.

    For those of you who aren't already aware, I am a homeschool kid through and through. As such, I never went to a traditional preschool with centers time and large- and small-group activities. I never went to kindergarten, or elementary school, or had to sit in a desk for hours every day while some adult I didn't care about droned on at the front of the room. My whole life was school, and most of it revolved around math and play, with a massive amount of reading in my free time because I enjoyed it.

    Now, to be fair, my experience isn't that stereotypical homeschool experience where the kids do their school online (or don't do school at all, and just sit and play video games all day or something). My experience went through several different periods of different kinds of school. Some came with more free time than others, assuming I actually got my math done quickly, because I was just at home and math was all my mom cared about because I read science books for fun. Others came with a whole lot of structure, like a miniature school at my aunt's house with twelve students ranging from 6 months to 18 years old, all taught by the same 3 teachers--the main difference between it and public school being that I wasn't usually there for more than 4 hours in a day, and the rest of my school time was just solo homework.

    All that to say, I never went to preschool as a kid. I never experienced Developmentally Appropriate Practice (DAP) like I'm learning about in my early childhood education college classes now. What I was doing was still developmentally appropriate, for the most part, but there wasn't really a preschool routine like I'm using with kids in my practicum now.

    I never got that experience. And now, as a student teacher in an actual preschool classroom, I've been realizing that there is a lot I missed out on. When my siblings and I got to paint, it was always with the same crappy watercolors that we didn't know how to use, on paper that doesn't take watercolors well and so it all turns into a brown mess. We didn't have the resources for large quantities of nice white construction paper and high-quality tempera paints. Our school funding was whatever my parents had available to use for educational materials, and most of that was for math and science textbooks and early math worksheets and manipulatives.

    Since beginning my work in this preschool classroom and designing an art center plan for the kids I'm helping to teach, I realized that part of the reason I'm not good at art is that I never got a chance to learn how to art. My mom was just one person, and she was doing her absolute best to balance motherhood, home care, teaching, and terrible sleep into each 24-hour period we call a day. Props to her; I don't think I would have done nearly as well as she has in her position.

    So, after spending the first month of this semester craving a chance to grab a paper and paintbrush myself and start messing around with some art techniques I've seen online, I finally stopped by Walmart on my way home from school one day and spent $17 on a pad of multimedia paper, three canvases for my final beginning artworks, and a 10-pack of basic paint brushes. It turns out that when your artistic older sister already has acrylic paint and doesn't use it often due to having a baby of her own, getting into art is pretty cheap--especially if you know where to look for YouTube art tutorials.

    And what have I found in the approximately 5 days since I started my painting journey?

    Art is kind of fun!

    I'm not very good at it yet, to be sure. But I'm not as bad at it as I thought I would be. With one tutorial and some experimentation, I've already learned some useful art techniques with my chosen medium.

    For example, did you know that if you put drops of acrylic paint directly onto your paper and smear them around with a large brush, you can get a pretty good base layer of blended colors for a simple painting? Put some blue, white, and black across the top of your paper in a certain way, and some green, black, tan, and yellow across the bottom in a certain way, and smear it around right, and you have the foundation for a moonlit forest night. Pictures and the tutorial I used incoming, I promise.

    Another technique I've discovered is that, once you have your foundational paint-blending in place, you can use a tightly-wadded paper towel or cotton ball (because I don't have an iron scrubber like you'll see in the tutorial I found) to blend the paint even better just by dabbing the surface of the painting with it while the paint is still wet. This adds some fun texture, too.

    Then, after all this is done, you can start pulling out your typical brushes and add some black lines from the forest floor up into the sky to make tree trunks, and add some thinner brush strokes for the branches, and then it's dabs of black paint with your paper towel to put leaves on the trees--but not too heavily, mind, because you've got to be able to see the sky through your trees!

    The final steps are to use Q-tips, of all things, to dab dots of white and yellow paint onto the forest floor and in the trees like falling blossoms, paint in the moon with a bit of cotton ball, and add the silhouette of whatever you're depicting in your forest.

    Bam, you're done. Moonlit forest night. And it's not even that hard to paint in tiny little silhouettes of two people walking through the forest, hand-in-hand.

    This is my best description of my first completed Official Beginner's Artwork, which I painted for my fiancé for his birthday, even though it's going to be late because I only got the idea to paint him something on his birthday. By the time this post comes out, I may have already given it to him, because I know he reads my blog and would get spoilers otherwise. I love you, sir Duke of Dorkland, and I know how much you hate spoilers. :)

    All right, you're probably sick of waiting. Here's the painting I created (sorry it's sideways), and the tutorial I used to learn the techniques:

Couple In The Woods (A Painting For My Love)

    The next stage in this story was rather entertaining for me. I went over to my fiancé's house for dinner with his family, and he suggested that after dinner we play games with his sister and her fiancé. However, his sister was exhausted, so we decided to do something else, and he brought up painting.

    Well, how coincidental, I thought, Because this is a skill I've been working on.

    Since I didn't want to reveal how good my skills had actually gotten by that point, I decided to just mess around with colors, and since my canvases were pieces of wood, it was a great opportunity because the dimensions of the wood were different than the paper and canvas I have been using.

    Anticipation and Blood Moon are the results of that experimentation. Anticipation is pretty obviously sideways, but I've gotten a good bit of feedback on Blood Moon that having the piece horizontal makes it look disturbing and/or unsettling, while having it vertical makes it less so. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that piece: What does it make you think of? What does it make you feel? What do you imagine the meaning of the piece might be?

Anticipation

Blood Moon

    My final completed painting so far is for my great-grandma, whose birthday is also this month. Since I got a pack of 3 canvases at Walmart, I figured that it would be nice to use one for her, and so I used the skills I've practiced on other paintings to create Sunny Hillside. Unsurprisingly, cotton balls make a great tool for painting clouds, and wadded-up paper towels are great for blending the dark blue and white paint I used to create texture in the sky. For the texture of the grass, I used toothpicks to scratch lines in the paint (a technique I also used to create the rain texture in Anticipation).

    I haven't decided if it's done or not yet--I keep feeling that something is missing, and I kind of want to add a pair of silhouette figures like in Couple In The Woods, to create a sense of childhood and childlike wonder as they lay on the hillside, looking up at the clouds (or else hike up the hill hand-in-hand). However, I haven't done it yet because I'm not sure how it will come out or if the perspective will work. I plan to return to the practice painting I did for this piece to try it out and see how it works before I touch the final canvas any more. If there are any artists in my audience, please tell me what is going on with this piece, because I really like it, but it feels like it's lacking something and I don't know what that is!

Sunny Hillside

    Finally, why don't I give you a peek into my process and share a photo of all my practice and warm-up pieces?

Practice Pieces

    In this photo, you can see my practice paintings for Couple In The Woods at the top. The one on the right, with the itty-bitty tiny people-silhouettes was my very first, before I knew what the scale ought to be. The other was the one that told me that having too many white and yellow blossoms was probably an issue! Also, having two of these practice pieces is kind of nice, because it tells me that while I like the size of the people better in the one on the left, the one on the right has better trees and sky shading. I did my best to combine the best of both worlds in the final piece, and while I don't think I was wholly successful, I am proud of the final result.

    Then there's the little lavender bush on the grey background. This one was inspired by a painting I did on the front of a hardcover copy of The Book of Mormon at Girls' Camp last summer, where I experimented with Q-tips for flower blossoms for the very first time. To be totally honest, I've watched Jay Lee Painting's video tutorials on and off for about a year now, so I knew about the techniques long before I got into this painting experiment.

    Next are the three mountain paintings. The one at the top left was the one I did first, and I think it's my favorite. I achieved the effects in that painting purely by accident; somehow I blended the sunset colors well, and then when I wanted to add yellow paint to get the sun rays down the mountain, I found that my yellow was too strong and diluted it with water until it turned into the pale wash of light across the mountain you see now.

    The second mountain painting is the one at the bottom right; I was initially less satisfied with the blending for the sunset than I am now, but after some time I like the smoky atmosphere it has--very fitting considering the fires burning through large portions of California right now. 

    The third mountain painting, in the middle, is unfinished. I haven't put the highlights over the peak and ridges yet (I'm not even sure if I like the shape of it!) and I haven't put any yellow wash down the mountain to break up the monotony of that brown/green blend, so the best part of it is the sunset. Once again, after some time and exposure to it, I like that sunset better than I did at first, because the colors are so bold and they look really good! I took a different approach to this painting than I did the other two by painting the sunset and blending those colors first, then painting the mountain over the top. I like the way that's given me control over the shape of it, and I think that's what makes that sunset look so crisp, but I really dislike the way the mountain looks and, as per usual, don't know how to fix it exactly.

    Then there's the little boxing guy. This was actually my second painting ever in this foray; I decided I wanted to play around with blending red into black, and once I had all that blending done, I had to add a subject to the painting. The highlighting is kind of messy and there's no defined light source, but I like the little guy's stance and form a lot--I can tell my karate training came through for me; look at how good his hand positioning is!

    The green painting with the flower at the center and all the little buds around is a hot mess, and I admit it wholeheartedly! It was my first experiment with trying to paint a large flower, and it spiraled out of control quickly because I was using my thumb to paint the petals and eventually my white and pink paints got too mixed up. Then I painted the detailing for the petals and center poorly and it just kept getting worse. Oh, well. It's a good thing that one was meant to be a warm-up for Sunny Hillside, because I think my flower-painting technique needs some work!

    Finally, there's the Sunny Hillside practice piece. I don't have much to say on this one, except that it's going to be where I experiment with changes to Sunny Hillside so it doesn't feel so lacking anymore.

    And there you have it--my painting journey for the last five days (as of the night I write this post, about one week before it goes out to the world so I don't spoil the various surprises within). I know it's led to a rather long blog post, so thank you for sticking with me on this one! It's been a fun journey, and this is a hobby that I definitely want to stick with. Painting, especially with good, calming music playing, is very relaxing and fun.

    Now, I'm off to bed. I have a lot of homework to work on tomorrow (thank goodness for field release days to give me time back for preschool field work!), and I'm trying to learn Clair de Lune as yet another gift for my fiancé. Between school, painting, and getting into piano again, I think I'm going to be rather busy for a while!