Painting at Debden House

Last weekend Ben and I went away to a weekend painting class.

Ben enjoys painting so I found this weekend class on groupon for water color painting.  We stayed on the grounds and they provided all the meals (which were surprisingly good).

 

I'm not really much of a painter/artist.  But we were each enlisted to do a portrait of the person across from us. This is Yvonne.

And that's my picture of Yvonne.

We also did quite a bit of sketching and painting ivy leaves.

This is Theresa and Alen. Alen was actually pretty good already.

This is Luccia. She's originally from Bolivia. She was also very good.  You'll notice from these pictures that Ben and I were the youngest by at least a decade and maybe two.

I walked to the local village center with Theresa and Luccia on Saturday afternoon.

The scenery was beautiful.

It's springtime so the flowers were out in full bloom.

This was the entrance to a big fancy house right next to Epping forest. There's a sign that says that there are guard dogs and CCTV. Which just makes me want to climb the hedge even more to see what's on the other side. I never got that show "Cribs" until I came to England.

There are all these -what I'm sure are- castles behind hedges and big fences and I'm just really nosy. I'd like to see what's behind that fence. 

Back at the painting class, we learned a few new techniques with masking fluid.  

Mine are the middle two. 

The Saturday class also involved our attempts at painting bluebells. These are Alen and Yvonne's work.  Nice, right?

This is mine.

I got bored.

And I messed up the colors.

So I tried painting leaves from a Japanese Maple instead.

But that wasn't all that interesting either and I was getting frustrated by my lack of skill.

So I switched to something with straight lines.

I think I was annoying the teacher because she wanted us to paint lilacs:

But you can only paint so many flowers before you start to go a little crazy.

Sunday I mostly just sketched out on the beautiful lawn. They had an amazing park and the weather was perfect.

This Japanese Maple made me think of my Mom.

And here's the front of Debden house just in case you were wondering.