My friend Dorothy Nagle and I are taking a series of 3 drawing classes at the Subic Bay Art Institute and Gallery.  Today was our second lesson.  Dorothy is already quite an accomplished artist.  I am not.  I had taken art in High School, a million years ago.  More recently, using a Visa Card retirement gift from the Roanoke County Library staff, I had taken several lessons from Katie Highfill.  Katie is a wonderful artist and a patient and inspiring teacher who luckily lived just down the street from me in Roanoke.  But I have gotten lazy since those days long ago in Roanoke and felt I could use more lessons to "make" me practice.  I had been asking around here in Subic, but had not noticed the Art Institute until recently.  A little over a week ago I went into the building that houses it and other organizations and was lucky enough to meet up with artist, Kohn Salao and Dan Dela Pena, the art teacher.  Luckier still was classes would begin the next day.

In the first 2 classes we have been focusing on composition and shading.  This week I brought my camera and took some photos of the class in progress and our finished work.  The class is very small, Dorothy, me and whoever else shows up.  So we get lots of attention from Dan.

All of the fruit and the tray were carved from stryofoam and painted by Dan, our art teacher.  There is a wall-size painting in back.  It was done by the man who owns the gallery.  For copyright issues I didn't want to include much of the painting. 

I was learning how to do the shading correctly so was practicing on the top right corner.  Dan was showing me how to make the pineapple leaves more correctly.  His leaves are in the center of the little practice leaves.  He also helped me with the shading on the fruit.  I was just glad I had gotten all of the fruit in the tray and most of the picture on the paper without going off the top of the page. He also showed Dorothy and me how to make the markings on the pineapple.

Dave and Dorothy celebrated their 39th Anniversary yesterday by taking us, Ray Wolfe and his daughter, Jamie, and friends Bob and Bing to dinner at the Coco Lime Restaurant.  And even though we'd had cake at the restaurant, Dave and Dorothy were kind enough to have some of the surprise Anniversary Cake I had made afterwards.  I'd  made a sign for the cake with our lable maker! 

Dave and Dorothy's Diesel Duck "DavidEllis" is parked one boat over from ours here at Subic.  It's really nice to have them here to share adventures.  Their boat was hull # 2; ours # 5.