The students at the Sumner Senior Center’s painting class are a dedicated bunch. Even though the instructor was recently out sick, they still came to paint.

“Not only is this a painting class, it’s an excuse for us to come and talk,” student Donna Welk said. “We’re at all stages of learning. I’m new, but we have some veterans, too. We like to get together and critique each other’s work.”

The class is one of the few of its kind in the area, and students who share a passion for expressing themselves on the canvas come from neighboring Puyallup and Bonney Lake to participate. Students work on their preferred subjects in their preferred media, be it acrylics, watercolors or oils.

Lee Kilmer, an instructor from Enumclaw, normally teaches the class from noon to 3 p.m. every Tuesday. The environment is casual. Students are able to chat about their lives or take breaks to enjoy coffee and snacks, either brought by students or taken from the senior center.

“We’re like the mirror image of college students,” Welk said after bringing in a bag of bread from the kitchen. “Anything free, we jump on it.”

It is the relaxed social environment that allows students to attend class even without a teacher. Kilmer provides guidance rather than explicit instructions and there is plenty of room for experimentation.

Welk is currently working on a painting featuring two gulls walking on a beach. She wants to place a piece of driftwood in the foreground and plans to ask Kilmer how to achieve accurate looking perspective for the object. But she is trying her own way to texture the sand closest to the ocean with gravel.

“I want to bring gravel into the painting closer to the water,” she said. “The way you’re supposed to do that is by dabbing a bit of paint onto the tip of your brush and flicking it (toward the canvas). I tried it out at home, but it wound up everywhere but the canvas.

“But that’s fine. We just do whatever we want. I find some of the things I paint speak to me. I usually paint horses and I don’t even like horses. But they speak to me.”

Many of the artists have years of experience painting or sketching.

Barbara Waid has painted in oil on and off for 50 years and is now able to reproduce a mountainscape after just roughing in the shapes on the canvas.

“I’ve always sketched,” she said. “In college, I took a couple of classes, but I never took oils. Once my kids were born, I took some oil classes and that got me out of the house.”

Juanita Beecroft works primarily with watercolors, which she adopted over 20 years ago when she retired and had the free time to pursue a longtime interest. Her current project, depicting a forest river with a house alight in the distance, once looked complete, but Beecroft she would paint over the entire piece to achieve her final effect.

Unlike oils or acrylics, watercolor mistakes can’t be corrected by painting over them. But Beecroft wasn’t concerned about the risk, and expressed the appeal of painting in a nutshell.

“It’s fun, it’s challenging and it’s easy to clean up,” she said.