Intro to Acrylic Painting

This is an amazing art class! I think even if you are good at drawing your drawing looks drawn, it isn't immersive like viewing a painting is. Paintings are comparatively complete, and warm. So, I've done a few dozen paintings in my life and several of them turned out good, but now I am really learning to paint in school.

Our first assignments were to get us used to knitting together areas of paint into a cohesive image without pre sketching, and for simplicity we are using only grey. For complexity it is a grey we mixed ourselves from sap green, titanium white, alazarin crimson, and ultramarine blue. But I put black in mine so I wouldn't use up all of my crimson on making gray.

Here are my 6 steps of grey. The leftmost one is pure the color i mixed out of colors, with traces of white from when i added a bit of it to the other colors and didn't wipe my palette knife (palette knives are amazing for mixing paint! I have never owned one, but they do a really good, fast job) and the rightmost one the same but white. We began with 9x12 panels painted with liquitex gray
Our first assignment was to paint a crumpled paper pinned to the wall. I picked an interesting shaped one. This is unfinished because most of the 3 hour class was spent mixing greys. We are finishing them on tuesday, but I probably won't post it unless it turns out amazingly, it will probably look about like this one.

Then at mandatory Saturday class we had to paint a model. I painted a close up because our panels are so small I couldn't finish in the assigned time nor get all of the shadows if I tried to paint all of her. I was surprised that of the ones I saw (not sure when we are critiquing them) everyone else had a little painting of the model taking up maybe 1/4 of the canvas in the middle. I am pretty satisfied with this exercise. I have lost my syllabus somehow, so I don't quite know what we are doing next but I think it is two tones, like green with orange or something.