Hi everyone!   Sorry to be late with the pics.  Here are the images from our Thursday class...

   A guy at the beach...  This was painted on a test strip two inches high, using magnifiers. A little bit of paint has been pulled back from his shoulder and forearm, suggesting that he is in the sun. There is a shadow under his chin.  A bigger shadow in his armpit.  And a really powerful shadow at the bottom of his swimming trunks.  

  Shadows can be additive, with darker paint being added, or they can be implied, with paint being pulled away where the light lands, which puts everything else in a little bit of shadow.  If the upper side of this fellow's thighs had had a little paint pulled away, as was done with his shoulder, that would give him even more a sense of being in the light. 

Old and young.  Negative painting to get the white swimming trunks.  The old man's back could have had a little more paint pulled from it.

Once you get started pulling paint back, it's hard to stop.  Pulling paint from the boy's shoulder, swimming trunks and thigh makes the sunlight realer.

A demo from a class long ago.. negative painting - a dark indigo background outlined her shape - including her big hair - then her swimming trunks, then her body. In painting the bra and shorts, I should have negatively painted the shape of her arm and hand.  A lot of scrubbing fixed it, but then there could have been a light glare at the forward edge of her arm.

There is an interesting question here about whether to paint near-to-far or far-to-near.  If her arm were painted first and then all the rest, an edge of light could be on the arm - and right leg - like the edges of light on the rest of her body.

The class demo - a couple at the beach.  Their space was left unpainted, then their swimming trunks were painted, then their flesh. Zoom in for the detail.

 
You may noticed a blue cooler at the left.  This is a series I'm thinking about called "Cooler By The Beach".  With lots of bodies.

Their bodies break the line between the beach and sky, but if there were less of the beach, they could also break the line of the horizon.  Two people breaking two long horizontal lines...  a tic-tac-toe chart.  If the cooler were then in the center of the lower left corner, the people would frame it from the side.  The woman is more tanned, so it was possible to pull more paint off her shoulders.  Pulling paint off her legs made them look very real.

In painting a beach, one might start with nearby people, then add more and more distant people.  Have people tossing a volleyball in the background on each side of someone in the foreground - would that push the subject forward?

How many ways can you paint people interacting at the beach?