More Painting

First, an idealized picture of my workspace, adorned with my beautiful orchid.

Several in-process shots; this one is also watercolor.

And the final version--I actually rather like it overall, and several non-contiguous square inches are pretty good. The decorative things were to keep the brush busy while I figured out what to do in the center, and they ended up being undesirable. Note to self: keep a doodle paper at hand in the future, just in case. The snake wasn't going to get any better; it's pretty cute anyway, and I just stopped before something bad happened.

Finally, here is a bonus snake from my sketchbook in late May. For well over a year I've wanted to do a large, fancy snake painting, but I haven't managed to start--apparently starting with small snakes and working my way up is how it will happen! This painting was inspired by the little garter snake I saw while out walking. No, that snake did not look at all like my painting.

(The dark blue black is watercolor, the texture dots and eyes are gouache, and the shiny stars are acrylic.)

On the (Figurative) Easel

Since this is the first day of the rest of the year, it's really about time I add something new.

I decided a while back that I need to do 100 paintings. I keep wanting to paint, but I'm not actually very good at it, and I feel like these days I don't even know just what my "thing" is--motif, subject, story, symbolism. One good way to improve as an artist and to figure such things out, is to do a lot of things. Practice. It was proven to me a bunch of times at art school--make 15, 25, 30 things, and you WILL, guaranteed, end up with almost 30% good or extremely good things.

Anyway, I've been painting a lot of backgrounds. A couple are still only black gesso, and the rest are painted with acrylics.

And today, I finally got myself to paint one. I had to make it as simple as possible, and apparently that meant watercolor, because acrylic for whatever reason seemed intimidating. So here is painting number one!

99 to go!