Day Six, Antigua (continued)

On Thursday the 1st Gloria and I had our primera clase de pintura (first painting class). We met with our teacher at the gallery here in Antigua to go and purchase supplies. he took us to two different places because one has good paints and canvases and the other has good paint brushes. Along the walk Gloria and our teacher talked to each other and I tried to follow along as best I could with Gloria's help when I was completely lost.
With our supplies in hand, we returned to the gallery and set up our two easels. Our teacher pulled out a photo album with pictures from all over Antigua. To begin, and focus on learning technique, our teacher wanted us to work from photos rather than life or imagination. We both picked out pictures of simple scenes; Gloria's is the roof of a church in front of the volcano Agua, and mine is of a wall with a door and its reflection in the puddles on the cobble street.
To start the painting we were given vine charcoal and our teacher explained to Gloria how to measure out the size of the width and length of the picture then multiple it on the canvas. Though our teacher explained it to Gloria and in Spanish, I watched and knew exactly what he wanted us to do. By measuring the lengths on the smaller picture and multiplying it by four on the canvas you get an approximate scale up that fits the canvas but is still to scale with the original picture. Gloria didn't understand fully so I reexplained it to her so she would be able to get started. Our teacher gave us minor corrections as we worked but we mostly had fun figuring out the perspective, scale and angle through trial and error.

After we had planned out the basic shapes and outlines in charcoal we were given trays with paper towel lining that had a centimeter of water in them and white, blue, red, and yellow acrylic paint. Our under paintings are in acrylic to make the use of oils on the final layer easier. The water is to thin out the acrylic so that it is more like water color and so that it doesn't dry while you are working. To start with the paint we went over our charcoal lines in yellow. Once all of our lines were gone over we took a paper towel and brushed off all of the charcoal lines, leaving the yellow paint behind.
We then went in with acrylic to plan out the under colors; shades, tones, shadows, and highlights. To make using oils even easier, we did two layers of acrylics over the whole canvas. Our class went over by about 30 mins (total 2.5 hours) so that we could finish our under paintings. Next Thursday (Sept 8th) is our second class and we will begin with oils.