He gave us challenging exercises like the very last exercise, where we had to draw/paint from memory.
We prepared our boards with two small sheets of paper, and selected a reference photo. He timed us, for five minutes we were to do nothing but stare at and study our photo. So we literally spent five minutes “seeing” our photo before doing anything else.
Then we drew for five minutes from our memory only. We looked for another five minutes, then again worked from memory.
On our second sheet of paper, we simply drew/painted for 20 minutes, then we compared the two; most of us like our first attempt better.
For those of us who fell in love with the images on his website, his flowers and birds, Mike came through with instruction on these subjects as well. Using his photos and value studies from his handouts, we attempted the peonies, the chickadees and more. We had fun, we learned a lot, Mike is an easy going instructor with lots of wisdom, humor and skills and he generously shares all of that and more in his workshop.