Oil Painting Class with Dianne Panarelli Miller

This is my 3rd oil painting class as a student at the Plymouth Center for the Arts in Plymouth, MA, where I am also a volunteer. Our class meets on Friday mornings and Dianne is an excellent teacher. She's passionate about painting and has been honing her craft with 3 paintings a day for 30 years! You can find out more and see her work on her web site here or her blog.

I am really enjoying painting again after so many years and oil painting is a wonderful medium, creamy and luscious. I'm using the water based oils, so there's no turpentine or toxic fumes.

We paint still lives or go outside, if it ever stops raining or being cold :-), and the Alla Prima, all in one sitting, style of painting ensures we don't get too bogged down on one piece.

A beautiful finished painting brought in by Christine, painted during our first class 3 weeks ago and worked on at home from a photograph.

Dianne Panarelli Miller, our teacher.

Dianne doing a demo of this week's subject. She spends about an hour showing us techniques, then we paint for 2 hours and try and get what she's shown us. She's very patient with us, as we  need to hear the same instruction more than once, Ok, many many times to keep us on track.

Dianne's finished piece in an hour! She's good!

After we've been at it for while...

Sharon's angle of her still life.

Deborah worked on the same one as I did. Dianne sets up two still lives so we have more room and choices.

Painting takes lots of focus, the time just zips by.

Dianne showing Christine some pointers. Christine is squinting, a technique we use to see the values and get rid of the distractions. Really helps.

My view of the still life, and the photo I took so I could go home and finish my painting. I found it helpful to unsaturate the color in photo editing so I could see the values clearer, same effect as squinting but longer lasting :-)

Starting out on my painting...

The finished product, although I am never truly finished. I can always find something that I want to change, but at some point I need to decide it's finished and move on to another one. I have much to learn and each piece teaches me something new.