Let's Paint Skill Builders: Painting a Pear

I love to paint but I don't really know what I'm doing, which is why I absolutely LOVE the Let's Paint videos by Plaid. I've been sharing the Let's Paint Live paintings I've done, but I wanted to introduce you to the Let's Paint Studio Lessons. The Studio Lessons include monthly projects and weekly Skill Builders. They are so helpful for people like me who are looking to learn the basics.

This week, I watched the Painting a Pear Skill Builder. Here's my finished pear:

There's plenty of room for improvement, but I learned a lot and am happy with my first attempt. And while part of my goal was to improve my painting skills, I had a secondary motivation to do some painting: to test out my new heat gun. 

My friends at Wagner sent me the Studio Precision Heat Gun (affiliate link) and I'm happy to say it worked perfectly! There are a lot of places within the video where you have to pause and wait for the paint to dry; instead, I just gave it a quick zap with the heat gun and I was able to move right on. What a time-saver! Here I am in the middle of the project. In retrospect, I should have done a posed photo so that the heat gun wouldn't be blurry, but I'm nothing if not authentic. The heat gun was going as I snapped the photo with my bad hand!

Now that I have a heat gun, I'm sure that I'll come up with all sorts of ways to use it. Although honestly, if I never use it for anything other than speeding up the time it takes paint to dry, it'll still be totally worth it!