Mission Accomplished

I've been burning the midnight oil this week super duper tough work style, even with my back seizing up on me and bullshit cold creeping in, and I've got my first painting in over a year sorted. It's not amazing, but it's a way back in. Already my brain is craving more paint on paint action and I've even been reading up on interviews ans essays to flex my mental muscles and get my head in gear to start churning out concepts to elaborate on with liquid pigment applied via bristle laden apparatus. I've put together some progress shots for the hell of it, not that my methods are ground breaking in any way, but I know that I always dig seeing how other people's brains work by seeing their working ways.

The first step is to get the basic idea of what you want on the surface, in this case; canvas by whipping up the drawing with as much accuracy as you can with some thinned-out-with-turps paint (usually a dark colour like burnt umber, but whatever I ain't gonna tell). I feel it's important to make this shit count, it's the foundation for the rest of the painting and if you can take the time to get it right you may as well. After that it's time to start laying in some paint! woo get excited! The general rule is dark to light, thin to thick. I feel that's some pretty spot on advice, I'd also add to that loose to tight, meaning you can get buck wild from the start and then tighten up as you add lighter, thicker colours.

Keep laying in those colours, making some shrewd decisions about how you gonna go, the darker, redder area? or add blue for the more purple areas? Either way sticking to dark to light helps as a strategy so you don't flip your wig trying to work out whats next. My problem is that I paint too much, less is more because you gotta leave room for the lighter colours, it's alot easier to lay in colours over a dry canvas than wet paint so be patient.

The main aim here is to get paint over the whole canvas, its downright lame to leave the background out and do it separately, just paint everything so you can get an idea of the light/dark/colour balance, then make adjustments accordingly. My main problem with being bullshit rusty in this painting game is I'm still not sure what kinda direction to go, I always like keeping it loose but I really like exploring colour by amplifying the saturation to bring out the characteristics of each section of the painting, making it almost hyper real, an exaggerated version of reality and it's sometimes bland as hell palette. As you can see I've got most of my colours from the reference, keeping it pretty objective, but it's still all good at this point because I just wanna get it all covered THEN I can start to adjust, I'm retarded like dat.

I'm on the home stretch now and you can already see I've started changing the saturation of the colours I was laying down initailly. This is the best part in my humble opinion, it's a constant battle, always finding little bits to fix and adjust, the painting really starts to click at this point. Because by this point you've got a lot of colours mixed you can grab a brush and slap it on without taking 5 minutes to mix up more, so you can stick and move jumping around the canvas balancing out the whole piece. The final piece isn't exactly the best thing in the world, but it feels pretty good to get back into the swing of things. The plan is to keep up the momentum, but as usual money is the biggest hurdle, but I'll let you know how I go.

Cheers
Roh