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
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