Well, I have utterly screwed myself with my painting. Instead of working on my “teacup on a white napkin” opus, I’ve turned instead to recreating one of my favorite photos of Gary: Gary at Bath.
And of course, painting someone I love has all kinds of extra baggage, plus I’m trying a glazing technique instead of a wet-on-wet technique, and I’ve just aimed too high. (Glazing = long and tedious and unfamiliar, wet-on-wet = immediate gratification.) I just can’t get started with it.
I need to work on the eyes and mouth and hair so it looks like Gary. I don’t particularly care if the Roman statue looks like Bacchus. The tea cups, on the other hand, looks just like teacups lying on their sides.
(What’s the round thing at the top? It’s the red bowl with a cast shadow to the right. I put it back.) I’m going to switch it up: glaze the teacups and scribble Gary out in the familiar wet-in-wet. The glazing is extra complicated because it looks like my transparent colors are opaque and some opaque ones came out of the tube transparent.
I really need to stop trying new things with the paints. I need the painting equivalent of playing “This Land is Your Land” on the guitar. Something easy I already know how to do.
2 responses to “Oil Painting Lack of Progress”
Yep. The rule I try to stick to with New Learning Endeavors (coding, knitting, whatever) is:
One new thing per project (or project segment), no more.
So, if knitting, a new project must not require both a new style (like when I went from regular back-and-forth knitting to knitting in the round with DPNs; I think maybe casting on a top-down hat with DPNs gives you the best sense for how a dyslexic spider might feel?) *and* a new kind of stitch I have’t done before. One or the other is fine, but not both (ideally).
On that theory, I would suggest painting a human (or maybe a sculpture/bust/something?) you’re not emotionally attached to, *then* when you’re decently satisfied with that, trying out the human you are attached to. Humans are especially hard; we see them more clearly than we see errors in apples, so they look Unnatural with surprising ease, and humans we really *know* have the easiest time looking not-like-themselves, because even if a stranger wouldn’t get it because that’s a plausible eyebrow position for a human being to have, *this* person wouldn’t ever have their eyebrow quite like that…
(however: that is a fabulous photo and I highly endorse trying to recreate it sometime! and maybe even having a whack at it now, as long as all parties involved are at least adequately fine with Gary looking slightly freakish. But… definitely not with materials you’ve never worked with before, oy.)
KC – I Agee. Hard for me to remember that hobbies are supposed to be fun, sometimes.