Lol. I’m sure your husband appreciates you showcasing his painting skills to the student community!
However, the good depth of field makes up for his bad paint job. However, in order to hide his paint job you may have wanted to blur the foreground and expose the background. Just kidding.
On a serious note, I’m glad to see that you’ve managed to set your depth of field to be able to isolate images in your foreground. It’s one of the most important and practical technical features to learn on your camera.
You mentioned that it’s not coming intuitively to you yet, and that’s okay because it does take some time before you start to notice how the different F stops have an impact on your photographs. The best thing to do is put your camera on “aperture priority” setting (often labeled with an “AV”) on the top of your camera. This means you’ll be able to set your aperture and the camera will automatically set your shutter speed for you in order to expose the photograph properly. This means you’ll only have to think about 1 element at a time which means you’ll be able to learn about the different aperture settings quicker. When you feel more confident shooting in this mode you can start to use full manual control and set both the aperture and shutter speed before each shot.
I would recommend shooting everyday until it starts to become second nature to you. It may take a month or so, but you’ll soon start to feel very confident with this feature.
Remember, small numbers = larger opening and therefore shallow depth of field
Large numbers = small opening and therefore deep depth of field.
Keep up the good work.