With a watchful eye, Marilyn Jackson makes a path around her oil painting classroom at the Natchez campus of Copiah-Lincoln Community College.

She offers advice on mixing colors and brush techniques.

“You’ll need at least three colors to get the right shade,” she tells one student.

“Maybe put a little more paint on the brush,” she suggests to another.

Jackson is eager to assist her students but is careful not to push one certain technique or procedure.

Mixing colors and getting them on the canvas is the ultimate goal. How you get there, according to Jackson, is up to you.

“There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” she said.

Her class of attentive students is not made up of your typical college students. Many of them, including Jackson, have day jobs and some are retired, but they all come together on Monday nights at the continuing education class sponsored by Co-Lin.

Jackson, who has taught at least nine oil painting classes for the continuing education program said the classes give adults the chance to do things they may have wanted to do when they were younger.

“I noticed that the classes are things that you always wanted to do,” Jackson said. “But, for whatever reason, you may have been in school or married with young kids, you never took the time to do it. You finally get to a point in life where it is time to do something for yourself.”

Reconnecting with a childhood interest is precisely the reasons Judy Uzzetta of Natchez enrolled in her first oil painting class. She has now taken three oil painting classes along with a class at Natchez Clay and one at Natchez Needle Arts.

Uzzetta is now retired but said that when she was in school she wanted to take the art classes offered at school, but, because of the extra expense, her mother did not enroll her in the art classes.

“She told me I wouldn’t make any money doing it so I could take classes when I was paying for it,” Uzzetta said. “And I am. I just waited until I was retired. I’m trying to get in all the stuff I missed.”

Classmate Millie Hinson, from Monterey, joined the classes for the same reason. Hinson, who is taking her eighth oil painting class from Jackson, drives from her job in Ferriday each Monday just for the opportunity to paint.

“I’ve wanted to do this since I was a teenager,” Hinson said. “I finally got my kids grown and have the time to do it.”

The eight classes Hinson has taken are really paying off. She has sold several of the paintings she completed in the class.

Not everyone is the class is a seasoned oil painter. Sharon Ogden and Denise Nelson, both of Natchez, are a mother-daughter team that are taking their first oil painting class through Co-Lin.

Ogden first began painting with a group from First Baptist Church in Vidalia but chose to take the class at Co-Lin to fine tune her skills.

“It is good to be able to come here with the other ladies and discuss the problems you may be having on a painting,” Ogden said. “Discussing the problem in class helps me figure it out, and I might not have been able to do that at home.”

Nelson said that taking the class was purely for fun, but said she was pleased with her progress as a painter.

“Sometimes you surprise yourself,” she said.

No matter the reason they joined, everyone agreed painting is a great time to relax and unwind.

“I’ve heard a number of people come in and say ‘I really needed this. It has been such a bad week. I really needed this time to relax,” Uzzetta said.

Jackson wants to make the class as accessible to everyone as possible by teaching a method in which you don’t have to know how to draw to enjoy painting.

“It really isn’t as hard as it seems,” Hinson said. “So much of it is getting the light and dark areas rights.”

She also stresses the importance of shading in making the painting “come alive.”

“It’s like putting on your makeup,” Jackson said. “You’ve got to have a little light and a little dark and where the two come together, that is where the painting really pops. That’s what makes it look like you can reach in and pick the flower.”

Uzzetta and Hinson were both working on a painting featuring flowers growing up a picket fence with a bird hovering overhead. And Ogden, Nelson and others painted a straw hat embellished with flowers Monday night. A watermelon still life had already been completed by some members of the class.

Jackson said the pictures people paint are as different as the personalities that paint them.

“Beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder,” Jackson said. “The colors are going to be different. You are going to use the colors that you are drawn to.”

That is true for Ogden who experimented with colors on her watermelon still life.

“I’ve painted blue watermelons,” Ogden said.

Jackson said she expects her first time students to become repeat class members like many of her other students.

I don’t know what it is, maybe it is smelling the turpentine or something,” Jackson said. “But once it gets in your blood and you just have to paint.”