A Magma Classroom Recap - 15 and 18 May 2023

We continue with our still life studies this week in the Magma Classroom with the first of our one-hour sessions. The shorter painting sessions are hopefully a bit easier to catch up on later for our users in other time zones.

The idea with these studies in not to create perfect paintings. They’re a space to work on our skills and refine our understanding of the fundamentals of painting that we covered in our earlier live streams.

Even if you missed those first ones, or are a total beginner, then we invite you to join us on the canvas anyway. Our host for the sessions, Ryan, will take you through his approach to the subject so that you can still learn, paint with new friends, and ask questions along the way.

Here’s a quick recap of the last two streams:

Magma Classroom LIVE 15 May

We kicked off the first of the one-hour sessions in the new time slot with a study of a bunch of grapes. At first glance, this may seem a bit too simple of a subject. In terms of shapes, perhaps it is. Where things get really interesting, however, is in the skin texture and the light passing through these slightly translucent globes.

When it comes to colors, we encourage participants not to simply color pick from the reference image. You can use the eyedropper tool though, to help you understand what changes are happening in hue, value, saturation and temperature. If we just grab colors from the reference, we leave out all the important thinking that is necessary to better understand what we’re seeing.

As with any subject, you can really spend hours on it once you get down to the details.

You can catch the replay of the session here, and it was nice too see our Comment tool being used at the end to leave encouraging notes for fellow painters.

Magma Classroom LIVE 18 May

The reference for our second session of the week was a photo of a skull on a set of books, with a small burning candle fixed on top of it. The clear warm and cool light playing across the surface of the skull, while candle wax runs over it, makes for quite a nice, challenging study. There’s plenty of detail here to keep you busy past the 1-hour mark.

We start off by filling in our dark background and then sketching out the composition before we start to block in the major shapes. Spending time on that sketch can be really helpful for getting accurate proportions early on without needing to fix too much later.

We had a great turnout for this session and some very different results which was interesting to see.

If you missed it, you watch the session here and follow along:

Two subjects were suggested for our studies next week: clouds and an octopus.

The Magma Classroom LIVE session with Ryan take place each week:

• Monday 12pm Central Europe Time
• Thursday 10am Central Daylight Time

Stay tuned about upcoming sessions by subscribing to our YouTube channel.