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Refilling the Well
Taking the time yesterday to just relax and have a nice date night was much needed. I’ve been pushing myself to post here every day, and while I want to post as often as possible, there is a balance in creating and then resting to refill the well of inspiration. And coming back into the practice, I sunk into a nice intuitive painting: free from any plans or expectations. Leaf shapes are still my current artistic comfort-food of choice.
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Embracing Sketchbook Messiness
If I want to finish my current sketchbook before the end of spring, I calculated (a couple of days ago) that I need to finish an average of 1.5 pages a day. Is doing that calculation a sign that my need to control chaos is creeping into my art practice again?
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Apples and Butterflies and Beloved Playlists
I’m glad I filled a sketchbook page, even if at first it felt like my heart wasn’t in it tonight. Pushing past the “I don’t feel like this/I don’t know what to draw that’s good enough” thoughts and into painting and drawing as an act of love for the practice itself: is that the secret to maintaining a regular art practice?
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Finished Painting: Chemise Study
I was thinking I’d title this painting “A Soft Chemise” or something, but it was meant to be a study of cloth folds, so maybe just keeping “study” in the title works. I don’t want to have to title every sketch and drawing in my sketchbook. That would be rough, giving things titles is just ugh. Yesterday’s experiments were useful, though I ended up using a lot less of the iridescent paint – just on the gold slippers.
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Sketchbook experiments: watercolor, colored pencil, and metallic paint
Well, of all the days I was sure I might skip out on painting or posting to my blog, today was it. I almost skipped online dance class — just feeling tired and anxious. I’m also stressed about the weather disasters happening around the country (and hoping things get better for so many people suffering this week). I decided that I wouldn’t try to make progress on my painting from yesterday, but instead would experiment and try stuff out to better prepare for working on it tomorrow.
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Watercolor Skin Tone Practice
I swatched several different skin tone blends before painting in the figure of my current work in progress, hoping I wouldn’t make the skin too blotchy, as seems the case with most of my watercolor skin tone efforts. Alas… I still overworked the paint and it’s still blotchy. I think I keep trying to treat watercolor like digital painting, and then I push too far and overwork it. Blah. More blending practice is necessary!
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Adding a Background (at the last minute)
Well, I was hoping I’d be further along with this painting, but I became quite distracted with painting a soothing pattern in the background. I didn’t originally plan this sketch/painting to have a background – it was more about studying cloth folds – but I decided to go for it. In my mind, the character was standing in the palace of Versailles in a chemise*. So it wasn’t so much picking a background at random, in as much as it was trying to feel what would be around the character I had in mind. I also decided to make her expression a bit less melancholy.
Art with a dash of old school blog rambling
