FREE Live Paint-Alongs (Level 3+) These live classes are honestly my favorite part of this community. We start with a blank panel and build a realistic painting step-by-step together. Just a room full of Drawing Dropouts figuring it out together. Most paintings take 3 to 4 weeks, with 1½-hour sessions each week. 🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟 Sunday (Painting A) 🕐 11:00 to 12:30 PM CST Tuesday (Painting B) 🕐 1:00 to 2:30 PM CST 🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟 ❓❓❓❓❓❓ How’s this schedule working for you? Would another day or time make it easier to attend? Comment below. I’m happy to adjust things if we can make it work better for more people. If you’ve been hesitant, I get it. I was nervous too. But now I love it. People come and go as they need to. The mic is always open for questions. We laugh. We solve problems together. And somehow… we end up with pretty amazing paintings. Come try one. If you are a regular inmate here - what is one thing you love about live classes?

This is @Fefe Gong's August submission for the new theme, INCARCERATED. I really like the uniqueness of this photo. The little boy is the star of the show here and I wanted to accentuate the whimsy and play. So here is what I did: - made the colors a bit more playful and childlike. - cropped the image to make the boy the star of the show. - I also added some light to him so that he doesn't blend in so much. - I removed the barbed wire fence in the bottom too. Which do you like better? 1 or 2? 🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟🫟 Today is the last day to submit. Tomorrow I will start putting them together in a grid for you to start voting on. I will show you different ways to look at the images. We will be learning about composition and what makes an image a good choice to become a painting. Then you all will vote what we start painting .... ..... ONE WEEK FROM TODAY! YAYYYAYAYAY OMG - this is so much fun for me.

Talking with new member @Jeanette Banda I was struck anew by the common distinction between Art and Craft. It seems to me that many of us dabble in craft categories during seasons of our lives. I headed up a Vacation Bible School one summer and that always has a large "arts & crafts" component. It was a bangin' VBS but that's another story. I see activities categorized as crafts definitely shade into art at some point. However, I tend to think of that at high levels of competence. My mother in law's quilts for example. She does truly beautiful work and I know we have all seen quilts that exhibit as art. So where is the dividing line? Macaroni pasted to construction paper probably falls wholly into the craft category. Or does it? I went looking and was surprised to find that Pasta Art is kind of a thing. See photo - Credit: @saltyseattle / Instagram I'm not especially trying to have a meaty discussion of What is Art though we certainly do that here. I'm pointing to a common theme that I'm beginning to discern...that many of us may be creating real art and relegating it to the craft category unnecessarily. Maybe talking about the line would help some of us develop our identity as an Artist and not be quite so quick to dismiss all the creative work we have already accomplished. It feels a whole lot safer to stick to Crafts. Or even Arts and Crafts. Artist feels like a giant leap indeed. 💫 💫 💫💫💫 Quilt made by Fay Vause, picture mine that does not do it justice whatsoever. Far right photo: reblog from http://spazio-msk.livejournal.com/114075.html Knitted design by Sarah Applebaum. She does not knit; knitted items are founded at markets and embellish them all around [into a collage]. Collage:An artistic composition of materials and objects pasted over a surface, often with unifying lines and color. A work composed of both borrowed and original material.

We make a big spread. All colorful and à la carte for the students. Thank you for your help @Terri Nelson