Paintings from class

Here are a couple paintings from the acrylics class I took.  

24 X 18

No surprise the portrait that I like the best is the one where we abstracted the background before starting on the portrait.  The more traditional portraits I was painting started to look better as the class progressed; but I the abstract background helped me have a little more fun with it.  Something about a pristine blank canvas seems serious and intimidating, but once you've already "wreaked" it with newspaper and burlap, then it's not so scary.  I don't know, maybe it was just me.  

20 X 16

And in the last class we did a landscape from a photograph.  Again, I had a lot of fun with it, hmm, I 'm sensing a theme here.  It's when I take this art stuff too seriously that things don't seem to work out.  I'll have to think about that.