Sailboat watercolor painting

I have been working at Michael’s in Grafton as their Painting and Drawing instructor since November. Mostly I have not been working. Grafton is a small town and we have not been doing the promotion to attract people in. But things seem to be getting going finally and I have had some people signing up recently.

My experience with this is that the format of these classes is not that good for anyone wanting to really learn art and be good enough to sell their work. The Michaels classes are great for people who just want to learn to do a very simple work and leave with a finished painting. To do a finished painting in ony two hours I am not able to take people through the basic skills they need to truly do serious art. This is a limitation that I am struggling with.

I would love to teach a more serious art class, where I take people through all of the basics and have the time to help people hone thier skills to become serious artists. I am enjoying my classes and meeting all the different people. I am also learning to work more efficiently and get work done faster. Since I tend to spend way too much time on each of my serious works, this has been a good thing. At first my own work in these classes has been kind of bad because I was not working fast enough for the short time period. Lately I have been doing a lot better. The work I am doing is just copies of lessons from Grumbacher, paintings from my own photos and copies of old art that is in the public domain. So not what I would call real art, just exercises, but that is all you can do in two hours.

We could do finished work faster if we would use modern art styles, but most people don’t want to do abstraction or Cubism. O’Keefe’s style will work and I did just do a class where we painted a watercolor flower painting in her style. But a lot of people want to do a more precise realism than this. I don’t believe we can do that in only two hours. But I still like this and I like the challenge I face. I would love to do classes in Sheboygan to save money on gas, but you have to take what you can get.

I am going to continue teaching at Michaels and also want to start posting tips and videos here, on my Facebook page and on YouTube. Anyone interested in signing up for one of my classes can do so on the Michaels website or in the Grafton store. I am teaching acrylic and watercolor painting as well as drawing on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. I will also look for opportunities to teach in the Sheboygan area. Finally, the next adventure I am starting will be a series of works centered around a portrait of a young model I recently photographed. Check back here to see the progress of this series of works and other works I do at Michaels.