The Homework Challenge from Week Five was started in last week's class. A landscape, West Beach Sunset, was drawn using water soluble colored pencil on a bumpy, student grade water color paper and opened up with a brush and water to provide back lighting. The homework was to continue the landscape using the set of 24 Prismacolor Premier wax based colored pencils. While each painting has beautiful backlighting, all three artists mentioned how the paper fought heavy applications of the wax pencils, but that light came through from the open spaces. After the critique, we prepared for a portrait painting of Dr.Shui-ying Hu, a Chinese Botanist of high esteem, who died last year at 102. She is being honored in April by the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University, and we have been given permission to use the photo for painting. First, we watched a film of Alberto Giacometti the famous artist, painting a portrait drawing. We watched this film twice to learn his device of starting with the midline. http://youtu.be/QS0PzOwfmHo Next we made a chart of one and a half inch circles, experimenting with many possibilities for flesh tones. It will be two weeks before we meet again to see what progress has been made.