This week the mandolin went from this:
… to this.
Not crazy about how the cast blue shadow on the right was leading my eye directly out. And the white outline of the mandolin is on the inner side instead of the outer. But I’m happier about the vase. and the strings will be darker next week. Maybe the background needs to lighten up. Yes. That will help. Only the vase tint wont make sense. I need to stop painting backgrounds after the fact.
It puzzles me how a first draft of a book is awful, but then it gets better and better, while a painting starts out great, and then goes downhill.
4 responses to “Weekly Paint Progress: 2/1/2024”
I think most of your paintings do progressively get better, it’s maybe partly that when you have blank space or something you’re going to work on more, it’s easy to image that those bits will come out Perfect and just what you were imagining in your head when you made the sketch, and then the more finalized things get, the more clear it becomes that… no, not so much. Okay, also, sometimes fixing things screws up other things fairly drastically. Sigh.
(with words, unless you leave entire scenes out and imagine you will write them perfectly later [or haven’t even started the book], both of these effects occur less, AND there is usually the undo-undo-undo with words if you decided a change was not for the better, whereas oils… little more tricky)
KC – i think you got me to the answer . I DON’T imagine any idea for backgrounds ever, so no plan, so no way of succeeding. I have always been that way: bad backgrounds from the get-go.
… yeah, that’d do it. You do kind of need to know what you’re aiming for… (unless it’s 100% unplanned abstract; you could start doing abstract backgrounds behind still life oils, though, I guess, but you could not use Jackson Pollock’s technique unless you… applied masking fluid or something? to the rest of the painting?)
KC – I am thinking sponge stippling. Or masking and flicking.