Painting, Day 3

It's been a crazy, hectic day, and I didn't get done as much as I wanted to. I did get to work on the black crane in the bottom left corner and I added a yellow crane head on the right bottom to balance out some of the yellow I added yesterday on the left side of the canvas. Some of the cranes on the right side of the canvas are supposed to be unfinished and I need to work on those next week. The idea is that peace is a work in progress -- it takes a lot of work to fold a crane, and it takes a lot of work to create peace. At any point during the process of creating either, you might find yourself saying, "this isn't working out the way I wanted it to," and wanting to give up. Then you try again and wind up with something beautiful ... or not... but it can be achieved with a little persistance and creativity.

Painting, Day 2

Today I repainted the background, and started working on shading on the top left cranes. When I paint, I like to paint from the background to the foreground, which is why sometimes things end up being painted in front of other things, only for the order to be switched around later on. Believe it or not, your eye can actually "read" depth of paint, so it's always good for things that are supposed to be on top to be literally painted on top of other things (plus, it keeps your drawing correct. It's easier to paint one thing and then paint another thing on top of it than it is to try and paint around an obstacle.)

I am liking the water-soluable oil paints. They were a little tricky to get used to at first, but I'm starting to really love them. I really love that I can just leave my palette out, then come back and add water and use old dried-up paint. You can't do that with traditional oils. You do sacrifice texture, a little, though. These aren't as buttery-soft as traditional oils, although they aren't bad. They even have that nice oil-paint smell that I love so much. :)

I think I am going to do a whole series of paintings of origami cranes.

Painting, Day I

Now can you guess what it is?



It's just the underpainting so far. I'm test-driving some new water-soluable oil paints that I got for school. I'm kind of a paint snob -- I really love oils and have been suffering through using acrylics more at school because of the fumes. I had seen these oil paints that you can cut with water in catalogues and put off buying them until I had gotten some good reviews from other artists.

They're pretty cool. They're not the same as regular oil paints, but are close enough that I think I am going to like them better than acrylics. We'll see how they do as I build up paint thickness on the canvas.

Iris

Iris
3' X 3', oil on canvas

This is actually an older painting, but it's probably my favorite. At the time I painted this, I was going through a rebirth of sorts. I had gone through some big, difficult, personal setbacks and was starting to come back to life, in a lot of ways.

Of course, that wasn't the message of the painting. The painting just happened. It's funny how sometimes your artwork can be more autobiographical than you intend it to be.