First Acrylic Painting Class

So I had my first acrylic Painting class Saturday morning at the local art store with David Lobenberg (check out his work on http://www.davidlobenberg.com/)...

I have to say that I was a little intimidated when I walked into the class and everyone was comfy cosy with their well-worn supplies... their stay-wet pallets were covered with paints and such from previous projects, whereas mine was perfectly white (because I bought mine that day along with everything else on the supplies list)... I asked the woman sitting next to me if she had painted before, of course she had, and when the teacher was giving a little intro into the wonderful world of acrylic paint (complete with industry lingo) everyone else seemed to follow right along, except of course for me...

I spoke to David a couple weeks before the class to make sure that I didn't need any previous experience to follow along in the class, and he assured me that I didn't... my previous paint experience only included touching up little details here and there on my scrapbook pages and using it with my foam stamps... needless to say I was a little terrified when he set a still-life picture of an apple and lime in front of us... OH MY GOD!!! There's no freakin' way I was going to be able to do this... I was certain that my final piece would be the worst in the class...

I decided to just take it one step at a time and tried not to look at every one's perfect paintings... Well, when I was done with the apple I set it on a nearby easel to rest my eyes a little and stepped back to view my work... i was pleasantly surprised when one of the women came up to me and said, "Your apple is beautiful"... well, if the experienced painter thought my apple was beautiful, who was I to argue... anyway, here is the finished product (with he reference photo on the right)... I guess I have no reason to be scared of still-life paintings anymore...

I'm thinking about making a frame out of lattice wood pieces, a little tip from miss Claudine Hellmuth, and I can't decide which color to paint it... I've narrowed the choices down to classic black or yellow... whatcha think?