Art Boot Camp

I made my second trip to Art Boot Camp today!!  Art Boot Camp is an art enrichment school, primarily for kids but also for adults.  We signed up for a crash course of sorts via Groupon, which included 2 two-hour lessons, one on charcoal, and one on acrylic painting.  The crash course is catered to working adults, so classes are held 7-9pm on Thur/Fri, or on Saturday.

If you've never really done art before, and you're a bit of a perfectionist, then this can be quite a nerve-wrecking experience!  Our first lesson 2 weeks ago was on charcoal drawing.  We started with a very dauntingly blank piece of paper and had to turn it into one of the provided images within the span of 2 hours. I smartly chose flowers in a vase, only to discover about halfway through that it was torturously hard, and had to give up on some of the details.  The bf was somewhat smarter and chose geometric shapes, which must have been much easier, but kinda boring.

The very blank start.

About 3/4 way through, but without the background.

Frantically trying to finish up the picture with about 10 minutes to spare.

Our finished products!!

Our instructors were really friendly and kept emphasizing that this was for fun and not to stress out over details or how well we were drawing.  Just learn some techniques of lighting, shading, shapes and perspective.  There was another pair next to us who were doing acrylic painting, and they sounded like they were having a blast, making fun of each others' paintings every few minutes hehe.  

Anyway.  I think charcoal is really tiring.  You can't rest your hand on the paper or everything will smudge, so you spend about 2 hours with your hand raised above the table, like when you're a kid and your mum tells you not to put your elbows on the table.  But harder.  Because drawing is a million times harder than shoveling food into your mouth.  Nevertheless, I think the picture turned out quite well!  Am pretty satisfied with the result, but had a shoulder ache for the rest of the weekend.

This week we did acrylic painting, which was a complete disaster!  I never realised how incapable I was of determining what color something was until I tried painting for the first time since P4.  So because I was so stressed about botching my colors the whole time, there's no halfway-point photo haha.

Before

After

Finished =D

If I were smart, I would have brought a picture of Mt Fuji to paint, and thoroughly studied it beforehand.  But I'm absent-minded like that.  Our instructors today were also really friendly and patient because we went about 25 minutes overtime, but they still helped us with mixing colours and figuring out how to blend different shades together.  My instructor was from LaSalle!  Which was kind of intimidating, and sometimes she looked like she was itching to take over haha, but mostly she helped me identify colours in the original picture then taught me how to get that colour using just a mixture of the primary colours + black and white.  Thank you muchly friendly instructors, I'm sorry I can't acknowledge you by name because I'm terrible with names!

In any case, whatever your skill level or motivation for art, you're guaranteed to bring back an artistically colourful piece of work to display in your room, or maybe offload to a family member ^_^.  I liked how classes are convenient for those of us who are working, and would definitely consider taking more classes with Art Boot Camp in future!