For our anniversary, Heather gave me some art books and some painting supplies. I’ve been reading them and experimenting with mixing and blending on some paper, but decided to step it up a little. Michael’s does beginners painting classes in the evening, so I signed up for the floral class. What few supplies I didn’t have were purchased in advance, and I was ready to go. The class was very enjoyable, and I learned quite a bit about basic techniques. I also discovered that some of the paints that I had weren’t that good. The reds and yellows just didn’t want to play nice when blending. I shouldn’t have gotten brown out of a 2:1 ratio of ultramarine blue and cadmium red light. Using the instructor’s better quality red and my blue produced the desired color, so it’s definitely my red. I had a few other issues like that, all with the lighter or more transparent colors that were fixed by using some of the instructor’s paints. The end result looks pretty good, though I can see that I’ve got a lot of work to do on my technique, as well as some upgrades on paints and brushes. I’ll definitely be taking a few more classes because this is a heck of a lot of fun!