Ladylee Paints!!!

Okay, so I finally did something that I have been meaning to do for YEARS and YEARS…

Sit down and take a painting lesson from my Auntie Joyce, the Artiste Extraordinaire:
She has been talking to me about it for awhile… hyping me up and all.

“It’s not that hard, Lisa.”

“You can do it. We will just sit down one day and paint something together.”

“Lisa, I know you can do it. You are talented. You can do it.”

She keeps telling me that when I was little, that she would ask me to do little things, like draw a table, draw a lamp on a table, draw a window next to the table, draw the lamp with the light on…

Yeah, I’ve got that down pack… I can do that in my sleep. (But I bet I could do it better when I was age of 4 or 5).

So now, over 30 years later, she still has this huge confidence in me..

“You can do it, Lisa! I will teach you.”

So one of my goals has been, in the last quarter of this year, to sit at her feet and learn a little art…

Now, my aunt is a stone cold sucker for barbequed crab legs… I went down to the Dekalb Farmer’s market, the only place in Atlanta with the FAT PHAT crabs, and bought her a huge mess of crabs. I qued them up on Sunday afternoon and took them on over there.



Never mind putting them on a nice platter… I’m bootleg…I threw them in a foil pan, slid them on the back seat of the Mazda and sped down I-20 west to her house.

Not only is my Aunt an amazing artist, she is also an amazing photographer. She took a picture of a flower in her yard, and decided that it would be the project of the day.



I swallowed hard when she showed me that photo. I thought we would be doing something a bit easier, like painting a piece of fruit or something. No, she wanted to do this flower. She liked all the shadows and different colors in it, and thought I could do it.




Lacey, one of my Aunt’s cats, kind of hung around… She was a bit sprite that evening. Maybe because she wanted to see me try to paint, i.e., mess some ish up… She decided to sit in a vacant chair and watch the action.







So we sat down at the table and got to work. Auntie had been looking at some movies on the Sci-Fi channel so we continued to watch as we primed our canvases. She answered many of my questions about the whole priming issue, and was very thorough in explaining paints to me. Personally, I thought that we would only prep our canvases that day, and I would come back another day, but I was wrong...



But she wanted to paint, paint, PAINT!!

Oh my!!



Here is a picture of my primed and blocked picture next to the photograph…





Here is where we left off some 6 hours later, damn near midnight… Now we both did 8x10 paintings of the same picture..



Can you tell which portrait is hers and which is mine?

And Auntie was still all crunk, ready to keep painting! I was down for the count, paint on my face and arms, sinking into delusion and confusion from being all sleepy.

But I had a lot of fun… I need a full put of coffee to keep up with her because when she gets to painting, she can get lost for many, many hours…

So, my personal project for the next couple of weeks is to purchase a few art supplies. I know one thing for sure, they are expensive as hell! No wonder my aunt kept saying “Don’t buy anything Lee… I have whatever we need.” Goodness.

So today I bought a full set of acrylics, and she is schooling me on what oils to buy…

So Auntie… thanks a lot for the lesson… I had fun!

And um… next time, get a pot of coffee ready for me…

We’re going to see which one of us can REALLY hang!!!

LOL!!

Yeah… you’ll beat me every time!!