And we're back with another look at the past week in the life of a part-time watercolor artist. Last time here.
This last week start off poorly, carrying over my painter's block and dissatisfaction with my work from the week before. I started Angela Fehr's 2020 winter workshop since it focuses on abstract paintings. I felt surprisingly good about some of my notan work and jumped right in to color experiments. But something just wasn't working. I liked a few color combos I tried, and I moved on to some larger attempts...but I wasn't super happy with any of them and didn't see an obvious way forward either.
But they say your brain works on problems in the background, even while you're going about other tasks and work, and mine surprised me with a totally new way to interpret my chosen notan: instead of being totally abstract shapes, by rotating the design I now saw a bonfire. This opened up a whole new color palette of warm reds, oranges & yellows instead of trying to stick to the winter stereotype of blue.
Suddenly I felt energized to paint, and had multiple ideas bouncing around. I painted a few color tests to find a combo I liked and felt really good about one of them. But that's the problem with working in my cheap notebook--the paper behaves totally differently so I was disappointed when I tried to recreate it on nicer paper and failed. This is a very typical process for me--I often love the very first thing I try, and just find subsequent attempts to recreate it frustrating.
I ended up with a handful of attempts that I will experiment on with some of my other ideas, and I'd like to try some less obvious color choices for a fire, such as opera (hot) pink. So I'm still feeling more optimistic this week than last, since I have some ideas I'm excited to try out and I see a way to keep pushing forward.
