This painting thing is kinda fun!

In today's Fundamentals of Theatrical Design, we finally got to the part I'd been dreading - painting!  They started us off nice and slow, though - basic color mixing, painting on a grid with the combinations labeled for us (e.g., "red + yellow").  Then it got a little harder - "approximate your skin and hair colors on those 2 faces (on the handout, next to the color-mixing grid); you get two tries."  Yike!  To my relief, however, I managed to come reasonably close.

The next step was to pick one of two costumed figures on a second handout and fill in colors matching the colors in one of two sample photos.  I decided against the pretty green bird only because there weren't enough different colors to suit me. ;)  Instead, I went for the autumn leaves against the old blue door.  Sadly, my palette doesn't include turquoise, only darker blues, so  couldn't use blue for my figure.  That still left me a greenish yellow and a variety of oranges, so my 18th-century court lady was all in autumn tones, including her orangey-red hair. :)  The instructor who's a costume design MFA candidate was complimentary when I handed it in, so I'm hoping for a decent grade.  (I was very surprised to get full credit on the design copying exercise we did last week.)

What I've learned this semester in my Scene Painting class came in handy, especially the color mixing exercise (even if it did kick my butt).  Nice when things overlap and reinforce each other like that.  However, it didn't prepare me for the difference between acrylics (Scene Painting) and watercolors.  I quickly learned the hard way that you don't need very much water at all.

I decided that this painting thing is actually kinda fun!  I wouldn't want to try starting from absolutely nothing, but coloring in a design someone else came up with is just playing with colors, which is always fun.  Maybe after the end of the semester, I'll get one of those adult coloring books and use up my watercolors on it (now that I know the dangers of too much water).