still untitled painting in progress
There is something about a blank canvas that is daunting. You’ve purchased it brought it home, unwrapped it, and set it up. Now you are ready to paint………………………..yeah, you know what I am talking about. That pause. Where you look at the unsoiled canvas and think to yourself “I sure hope what I am about to do to this canvas increases the value of this rather than decreases it!”
Can you tell I was feeling particularly ambitious too?
I have always found the best thing to do is dive in head first. Make huge big bold stokes that completely dominate the canvas.
Truth is, I almost left it like this. I was feeling particularly minamalist at this point. I used the rest of my black here and didn’t go completely overboard like I did with the Storm Daisies painting. The trick was to spread out the black so that it covered the entire canvas. I used a old piece of one of my art desks for this. It had a rounded edge on flat and straight piece of metal that worked beautifully for this purpose.
I have a completely blacked out canvas. I filled out a bit more of the scrapes you see here. This was a raw finish for that stage.
The flash made the blue look a lot more like a baby blue. It’s not. It’s a lot darker than that. But currently, there is no depth to this. Blue on a black field doesn’t do much for me. Unless we went with a more defined shape? Things to consider? Maybe at some point I will work with just two colors and try something like that.
You can see how working with wet paints adds the glossy glass-like finish here.
I love these little bamboo skewers for stirring paint. Just don’t accidentally stab yourself with the sharp end. Ow!
The colors still don’t look quite right with that flash. Here is a better rendition after I added just a little more red.
And do you know what? When one person in the household is feeling creative, everyone gets into it. Creativity is contagious. My wife used to paint quite a bit too. Here she is starting out on the first painting she’s even thought about in three years.
Meanwhile our kitties are cooped up in the bedroom.
You knew they’d fit in here somewhere…
10 Comments
I can’t even try to answer the questions you raised in the previous post but i agree that blogging and painting are not really compatible … at least with me, anyway. It is all too easy for me to involve myself for a few hours with the former and neglect the latter for days on end.
My goodness I found this demo a bit startling! … not so much what you were doing as WHERE you were doing it! I would have been having kittens that I would mess up the carpet! And your wife lets you DO IT and does it AS WELL!! How adventurous you both are … or maybe you both have better manual dexterity than I do ….
In our house my studio/painting area is one half of the bedroom so my two kitties can flop out on the bed AND watch at the same time. I am teaching them what to do so that they can give me a hand (or several paws) in due course. The critics won’t know the difference.
Yes, we have a very small apartment. three rooms! I currently have a gentle heater on it trying to dry it before I go to bed. Otherwise we will have some very unhappy kitties who can’t get to the litterbox.
As for my wife, well… I am happy to have a beautiful wife who joins me in tempting fates at buying our landlord new carpet for the apartment.
We are coming up on our anniversary here on the 19th of this month. Two Years!!
I may incorporate the kitties in a painting when it gets warmer…lol
I felt compelled to comment after what Lesly said! Truth is, short of borrowing someone else’s house space, we don’t have anywhere else to do, well…. anything! I’ve never been much of a house keeper, (William will attest to that!) so I never think about things like that! I’m not one to buy things I don’t use on a regular basis, and decorations are put out to be picked up and examined. So chances are if it’s breakable or stainable, it was a gift from some one who doesn’t know what a klutz I am! I will say that I expressed some slight concern to William before he started, since we are renting, but he is usually good about those kind of things. He was almost done in fact when I started my painting, so I wasn’t too concerned.
[...] still-untitled-painting-in-progress/ [...]
William and lovely wife of almost 2 years … may you both continue to put your art before such boring things as housekeeping and carpets …. good on you! Anyone who loves painting and cats can do no wrong in my eyes!
Wow! That much for large canvases, huh? Have you considered stretching your own? (Not that I know what I’m talking about…)
yeah, I kinda cringed for that too. For me I guess it’s the convenience factor. I’ve stretched my own before. But by the time you get the wood, canvas, gesso all together, you pretty much are coming out only a little ahead. I went with the wrap-around canvas though too here. So that was about $15 more. Plus, with our small apartment, there really is no place to store all that for the next canvas.
I only buy the small ones (wrap-arounds, though), so I had no idea!
[...] You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your ownsite. [...]
[...] is an abstract painting I completed awhile ago that is as of yet untitled [...]