bob ross must be spinning in his grave

I got back from my first oil painting class a few hours ago.

Yeah.

I'm doing it through the local community education program for adults. When I think of adult education I think of that Simpsons where Homer teaches the class on successful marriage and there's a sign out front of the education program center that says "We take the 'dolt' out of a-dolt education."

A long while back we got this awesome class catalog in the mail that had tons of sweet classes in it. Most classes were between 50 and 60 bucks so I figured that even if the classes were a little lame, they would still be cheap enough to try guilt-free. One of the classes was break dancing. Totally. I also considered yoga, photography, Photoshop and drawing (for the dozenth time). The guy on the phone said people complained that the drawing class was too hard, so I avoided it; although maybe it's a different kind of "too hard" than the "too hard" in college.

So for 50 bucks I settled on oil painting. Then, two days ago I went to pick up my supplies. That's where they get ya. After getting oil tubes, brushes, tape, a palette and other miscellaneous debris my tab at the art store was about 100 bucks. I did pick up some watercolor stuff that I may not need (the suggested materials list included oil and watercolor equipment, but it turns out we can sort of pick whether we focus on one paint type or the other), so I'll probably be returning some stuff, but I still need to go back and pick up some mineral spirits, many more canvases and even more brushes.

Our teacher is a lovely hippie soul named Tera. Her motto seems to be a very friendly "figure it out." I always wanted to break myself into art class, but the same thing happens every time I do. Everyone in the room already knows exactly what they signed up to learn. They just use it as a place to do it. After Tera turned us loose to art ourselves silly, I sort of put out a needy vibe by subtley stating how I've never really painted before, I've only taken a couple of drawing classes and I'm also very colorblind. Halfway through my masterpiece of the night I contracted some kind of anxiety associated with an inability to determine what set of procedures I needed to enlist to actually make something of a picture.

Tera said we'll be doing more technique next week. I'll report on that.

In the meantime, here's how we turned out today:


I think it actually looks pretty good if you take a few steps back from the computer.