Painting Portraits Begins!

I had my first painting class today! It's an intermediate class at a pretty good studio/gallery and the teacher is incredibly talented with a long resume. I was so nervous the whole week. What if I'm in the worst one in the class? Or the teacher looks at me with pity as she walks by thinking the whole time that I should be in the beginner class instead? What if I plain old suck?

At first I did suck big time and didn't know what I was doing. At the break I went to get water outside and when the teacher passed me I said something like "I'm not sure I'm up to the level of this class." I'm such a wimp. But she immediately said that I was good enough and that I just needed some direction which she would give me when we got back in (since I missed the first class last week). I sucked it up and went back in and kept trying (it was a long class). The whole time I kept thinking about quitting. I'm not good enough was rolling through my head like those news scrolls at the bottom of the CNN channel. But slowly I started to get the hang of what she was saying and I liked what I saw. Here is a piece I did in an hour or so. We did a bunch of quick studies and this was the last one I did before I had to rush off to get my son from preschool (I'm sparing you the first few since they were just awful).