Man! Where to begin...
It was an awesome class! Dru, Krystina, Mel, Rick and Anto were all great people and I had such a good time at the class.
The Studio is amazing. Dru has an easel in the middle where he does his demos and slide shows. He has a live camera feed to huge monitors surrounding every side of the U Shaped desk. He has a great style of teaching where he is actually giving his thoughts on exactly what he is doing and what he is thinking about and analyzing the painting as he is making adjustments. We learned how to do portraits from start to finish. Color Theory and Dru's Color Buffer System, Matching opaque and transparent paints, masks, shields, fades, analyzing a painting and which areas to match and which to shift tones with transparents. One of the really cool things was how to recover from a catastrophic error. We learned how to do it and about half way through the painting, one of the other students(never touched an airbrush before the class) spilled some paint on her painting. She tried to wipe it off quick and removed all of the paint from about a 1 inch part of the jaw line of her painting. She used the recovery technique and you couldnt't tell she ever even did it. It was a very intense course, but very beginner friendly. We painted every day from 9AM to Midnight. So many hours it was ridiculous, I was tired as hell every morning, but after breakfast, it was all good. The food at the place was some good southern cooking with 3 squares and plenty to eat for every meal. Everyone was so nice and helpful, you just can't beat southern hospitality!
I would suggest Dru's classes to anyone, even with the amount of experience I have, I came out with a whole new outlook on painting and how I will approach each piece I paint in the future.
Here is where I made it with the painting. I still have plenty of color shifting and detail work to do, buy now I know how to tackle all of it.
Portraits were very intimidating to me, but now I think I'll be alright.