Fleming's Class 2

Michael Sitting, watercolor over graphite
14x17in (c)2011 by Jess Sanaie

We did three 6-minute sketches to warm up, Steve did a demo, then we did three 30-minute poses. Even though I was really sick and had a fever, I came to class. I learned to:

• Use more saturated colors - I'd been using really diluted fleshy colors, but when viewed from afar my paintings weren't as good that way
• Paint bigger - The larger I drew the figure, the more room I had to play with color
• Consider painting on the back of the paper - it has less tooth but can make for smoother color-mixing
• When dragging one color towards another, sometimes a brush stroke going upwards (instead of top to bottom) works better
• Redraw some of the pencil marks halfway through, otherwise they can get lost
• The whites of the eyes shouldn't be bright white because they're still in shadow
• Leave more white space on the figure
• Remember to have fun - people can usually look at a painting and tell if you had fun painting it