Saturday, January 7, 2017

Making Progress

See? Filling in the blank space makes it look so much closer to done!
Although my logical side understood that I was just getting started. And needed to do as much as possible while that blue was still wet on my palette so I could make it lighter and darker as needed. 
Wow. There was a whole lot of empty space to fill with squiggly reflections! But that is what drew me to the photo. The painting is much more realistic than I like to do but the reflections. They're real of course but it's like they're a stylized version of reality. I love how they move. I love the shapes. It feels like what I try to do with my trees. It's abstraction in real life. And it's mesmerizing. So much so that focusing on it so I can paint it for hours made my eyes go a bit buggy :)

Why not now?

So quite awhile ago I finally splurged and bought some Golden Fluid Acrylics. I have been dying to try them since I first heard of the possibility of painting like watercolors with the permanence of acrylics. It would mean getting to paint on canvas and not needing glass to frame. But when I bought them, something came up and I didn't get around to trying them. And then I got a little intimidated by them and felt like I didn't have the time to figure them out. Ha. Kinda ridiculous, eh? There were times when that was true like when I was up against a competition deadline or working on commissions, but basically it was a fear of trying something different and being bad at it. I get so little time to paint that I feel a lot of pressure to make every second count but the thing is, some of those seconds need to be used for learning and experimenting. So I spent a night sifting through photos until I was finally inspired by this one, and decided to give it a go with those unopened fluid acrylics. I maybe should've picked an easier picture to start on or a smaller canvas or something, but the reflections in the photo just were so exciting! Reflections always mesmerize me. It's like they're already paintings, but ones that are constantly moving and if you blink, you might miss the best one yet. 
So it's been sadly very slow going. Even the drawing took forever and after each painting session I've been a little discouraged to see how little progress has been made.
I mean, I worked so hard and long between these two! And you can hardly tell.
I was actually done for the night after that last photo, but when I looked at how little it seemed like I'd done, I picked my brush back up and filled in one more color so there seemed to be a little more to show for my time. 
All that blank canvas is the problem. Filling it in (even if it's just a preliminary layer that'll get painted over time and again) always makes me feel like I'm getting somewhere. So that's my goal for tomorrow! 

Wednesday, January 4, 2017

Time-lapse video

So I painted this for the festival sometime during the summer, but then totally forgot I guess that I'd taken a video of the process. I don't get enough sleep to remember details! Ha. But we found it and my husband fixed it up for me and here it is! A friend of ours bought it at the festival, so it had a happy ending too, which is always nice :)
*I think the video got turned off because my phone tried to warn me that it was running out of battery. Lame. And really unfortunate timing because the best part of my time-lapse videos are when I do a large wet-into-wet area. Come to think of it, it's one of my favorite parts in real time as well! Only watercolor works magic like that. It's why we're friends.