Monday, February 1, 2010

Mistakes, Scrapes and Surprises

I'm back to trying new things and focusing on learning what styles and techniques I like. Painting on a bit larger canvas after doing a lot of small paintings. This is 9x12, not huge, but a lot different than painting on 6x8. This is a painting of a little glass syrup pitcher I bought at a junk store (I mean 'antique store') that I drive by on my way to the studio.

I spent a long time sketching the shape of the pitcher - it was surprisingly tough to get  the shape and proportions correct. My goal for this painting was to do the whole thing with just one large brush, thinking that it would help me not get all anal and detailed. It was going along just fine until I put some yucky color on the background which led me to scrape it off with a palette knife. I scraped and scraped and then realized I kind of liked what was happening. So after that I started using the knife to lay paint back down on the canvas and it started to get that multi-dimensional color that I love and have struggled to achieve.

This is a work in progress and I liked where it was going. And then I stopped by the studio on the way home from work tonight and proceeded to muck up the background so it doesn't look like this now.  Ended up wiping the whole background off. Unfortunate, but that's ok, the layers underneath that are dry stay there after you wipe the wet layers off. And that helps create those layers of colors that if you do it right, (which I haven't quite figured out yet) peek through the subsequent layers. I'll just keep going until I get back to where I want to be.