Saturday, March 26, 2016

Painting Challenge, Part 4: Conclusion

(Hah! I'd saved this draft months ago; apparently no new insights have come to me, so here it is. Happy spring!)

Any sort of art challenge ends up with...challenges. Lessons you learn. Some of those aren't surprising, like the resistance you have to push through to keep going, wanting/not wanting to do it, or wanting to do anything else but that.

One of the things I learned in art school was that if you make a lot of things, you end up with a few really good ones--this time, however, that kind of didn't happen. I'm disappointed, but in retrospect, not really surprised. This was all going on at the most stressful time of year work-wise, and many of these were painted at the, "I am so ready to go to sleep--but wait, I didn't paint yet" time of night.

Which leads to Hurdle Number Two (Number One being the resistance): technical issues!

I have dabbled with watercolor and gleaned some bits of insight, but...oh, the technical frustrations of trying to do a somewhat satisfactory watercolor painting in one sitting. That basically is impossible. I sort of pulled it off with a few of the more "sketchy" ones, but trying to do something that looked complete and had dark shadows--it doesn't happen. In order to add more paint, more darkness, the first layer has to be dry. I can't say how many times I was impatient, and ended up lifting ALL the color off! Or adding paint and having it run all through another area I was done with, and then having to try to fix it.

One completely different issue that hadn't occurred to me was scale--my normal drawings of faces probably average around one inch high, so increasing to close to six inches was drastic! Another time I would also collect reference photos ahead of time; I only used about three for this challenge, which is why the faces look so similar.

Days 23, 24, & 25

Days 26, 27, & 28

Days 29 & 30