Artist Studio
I like to plan the painting with the end in mind: what do I want it to look like when it is finished? I never start a painting thinking, “Gee, I wonder if I can paint that tree? Or that surf?” That is too limiting!
In this exercise that I did for my watercolor class I had them work with one brush and primarily black paint and just express yourself on partially wet paper, some places wet, some dry and some just damp.
Today I am going to show a step by step demonstration of an oil painting I worked on today, I am sure that it is not finished but it has enough of the work completed that I can talk about it as if it is done. I used as my reference an oil painting I painted about a few months back and I was never very happy with it, although I have found a lot of people like it. I find it to be too clumsy and disjointed so I decided to try it again. The painting below is the first work and the one above is today’s piece.
The studio is cleaned up, well clean enough for me, in other words I can find enough flat surfaces to work on now I really need to get started painting and putting my creative life back in order. It is amazing how I can find any sort of distraction to keep me from working and yet make me feel like I am really doing something worthwhile, cleaning is good painting is better. The holidays are over and all that I have been working on is finishing a bunch of abstract acrylics from my creative class at the Art League. Over the past year I have been posting creative jumpstarts, these being designed to help the artist at any level of accomplishment to get back into the creative groove. Everyone has times when due to outside forces their art has taken a backseat to the other aspects of life, this is normal and there should be no quilt about having a life outside of art but now it is time to crank it back up and really make 2013 the year of your art. I am going to do a series of warmups and daily paintings, one a day for 90 days, to get myself going and they will be the focus of my next few postings. Start working with me and we can get there together. I hope this regime works for you too. I have a good feeling about it.
Day One: Today I want to just paint a simple painting with a simple color palette, not getting too involved with details and minutia. I have drawn a low horizon composition using a harbor theme from my recent cruise to South America.