Painting Studies

I'm currently taking a class at MassArt called the Powers of Observation with Catherine Kehoe. For the class I've been doing about 2 paintings a week for several months now. There's a few weeks left in the class still but I wanted to posted what I've done so far. These were all done from life in about 3 hrs more or less. I wanted to take the class because I've become so dependent on photographs from my main paintings that I have fallen into some bad habits. The class is helping to break some of that up and give me some fresh new technique and ideas. No earth tones were used in any of these. The goal of the paintings is to mix the exact color we see and paint it directly. It can be a bit mechanical sometimes and gets tricky with the figure. However it is definitely worth taking the time and pushing to get it as close as possible. I expect this to eventually influence my regular wood and help make it stronger with color, more nuanced, and more bold overall. Head over to my Flickr to see the paintings I've done so far.