My love affair with Oil Paints!!!

So last weekend I took RJ to this free class on oil painting for kids. My friend had been going and said that we could paint too. So I was excited to say the least.
I learned all my art skills from high school and my teacher new nothing about Oils. So last week was nothing but a trial and error and a whole lot of revelation. Which brought me to this week! I'm so excited about the possibility of painting landscapes. I have taken so many pictures in my life just hoping that SOME day I would be able to paint it! Well, I finally feel like I will be able to! This is my painting from yesterday's class..It look's like a landscape doesn't it!! YAY! So then I decided to finally try Oil on human anatomy.. It's going better than expected really. I'm not used to art taking so long for me. I was always one of those people who was always finished first in class. Well the landscape painting only took like an hour and 15 minutes or so. But with the portrait, I should have been smart in buying my oils.. I just bought primary colors and white, but I really should have gotten burnt sienna.. I mean thats all I would need for 75% of the painting.. It's just so hard to blend you're own colors!! This is more towards the beginning of the painting.. I didn't have all my shadows in, but I had my eyes pretty good..

This one on the left was after I got more of the shadowing in, BUT. I realized, Our Lady is looking at me!! Which I loved, but that wouldn't be accurate for this portrait of Our Lady. Since all photos of Mary are chocked full of meaning. In this case with the image of "Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity," She is always looking down with a sense of humility. Her looking at me gave me a sense of her sharing her soul, it's was quite beautiful really, but it wouldn't work for this image of her. Anyway the image on the right is of her after I changed the eyes, which I need to change again because they are too big and PURPLE!! My fault for not getting a black!! lol It's so much trial and error, but every single minute I am noticing that I am able to pick things out I hadn't noticed before before. I am realizing, hey I could get pretty good at this. Well not just that, I am pretty good at this!! lol This image is painted from a statue and it's an unrealistic statue at that, so I'm having a hard time knowing if I have the ability or not to create a realistic painting.. But I look forward to finishing this, to find out!! Still tons of work to go, changing the eyes led me to having to change a lot more things.. But it's amazing how different the eyes can making a painting..