This class was all about painting in acrylic. We started off with simple exercises like painting an egg in the first month of the class. The rest of the time was spent on making a full on illustration of an environment with 30 species of plants and animals in it. It used to be that everyone in the class had to do a tidepool illustration but the class has changed and you can pretty much do any natural environment you choose. You can't have anything man-made in the composition. It has to be an envoronment completely untouched by humans.

I chose to do a Hawaiian Coral Reef. It was easy to obtain good reference material on the Hawaiian Coral Reef so that's why I chose it. Anyway, there are over 30 species of fish, plants, and other creatures in my coral reef piece. I am pretty happy with it. My instructor suggested working on it a little more to polish it up but I haven't really gotten around to that yet, haha.

Every semester, something like a third of the class doesn't get their illustration done enough to receive a grade for it. These students take an Incomplete grade and then have another semester to finish it up. I was afraid I'd be one of those students but I wasn't thankfully. I think I ended up with an A or A- grade and I was really thrilled with the grade. What I enjoyed most about the class was that I was able to just sit in class for three hours twice a week, put on my headphones, and just paint. I didn't have to worry about anything else. It was really relaxing. All of the other art classes I've had, class time was never used for working. It was a low stress class and I learned a lot from it.