What have I painted lately? A little of this.
Using the paint from the last painting to start the next painting is becoming the standard rather than a once in a while thing. The blue sky and dark coloured land were blocked in with leftover paint, the sky paint was thinned for it’s use in the previous painting. Once the thin blue was nice and dry I started this painting with some mountains, then onto the tree lined foothills, then some hills on with a central valley that needed a waterfall.
Somewhere in there I knocked this painting off the easel and caught it before it hit the floor. Whew! Except for a big old thumb print on the mountain. Enter clouds! And I’m glad I did, I like these clouds. I did not love the waterfall so I added rocks, rocks, and even some boulders to help contain it.
Next I started adding more and more detail. Highlights on the rocks.
A happy tree. Some bushes and scruffy little plants here and there. I am starting to like it.
I continued to work on on it and added some thin blue to the waterfall. Deja vu. With the paint on this canvas wet I moved on.
And a little of that.
As usual I started this blank canvas to conserve paint. It’s a bit of both the Reduce R, and the Reuse R of the trio. Sometimes my brush will be full of paint, but the job on the current canvas will be done. I walk around my house and look at the paintings I have on display, sometimes adding a touch from the loaded brush. Inevitably I still have a lot of paint on the brush and I don’t want to waste it into a rag. Out comes a new canvas and I can smash the dirty brush into it maybe blocking in a shape or two. That happened and it mostly dried before I put away the wet canvas above and put this in place.
I added alizarin crimson with a two in brush onto the mostly dry canvas. No Bob, it was not Agony City, but it was more difficult to work with than on a wet canvas.
I mixed the alizarin crimson with Prussian blue and added more colour.
BTW I am still re-using paint from the previous painting session, so at this point I just had a dark mix left (mix of vandyke brown, alizarin crimson, Prussian blue and sap green) and some titanium white. So I added some grey.
How about some happy little trees? I had a pretty big pile of that dark mix to use up, so I also covered up the kinda neat grassy hill.
Prior to my first picture in this blog post, before the grass hill came in we had everyone’s favourite Mongoliensis in the bottom corner. If you squint and have a good imagination you can see him under the grass hill. But not once I darkened the hill. My final bit of work: scrape away paint. Then the remaining paint became a newly roughed in Mongo.
To do on this one? Carl - fix the figure/proportions, then add some details. Big boi boxers and more. Donut. Princess Donut. Princess Donut the Queen Anne Chonk. Book 6 spoiler. I was thinking of depicting her ability to walk on air since she loves it so much. However that’s not very dynamic, even after adding the magic missile - eye lasers in I think it would be kind of blah. So she might disappear only to to reappear in a more dynamic pouncing pose. Maybe. Mongo needs to be painted with every bit of my skill since I made him the most foreground object. No pressure. Painting is fun right? Bob said this would be fun! And the monster(s); well the tree that Carl is punching could be a plant monster - they’ve seen a couple of those. Or maybe it’s a placeholder for something else. I often don’t have a finished vision for a painting and even with practice visualization is not my strongest skill. Usually there’s a seed of an idea, I plant it on the canvas and water with paint. I just realized that I am a gardener in the Stephen King on writing sense. I tried being an architect (again metaphorically) as a young person and it did not work out for me. See the previous blog post for detail about fighting against perfectionism.
Peace