Ya know, I'm starting to think doing these on Friday isn't such a hot idea after all. (Catch up on last week here.) By Friday I'm totally pooped from working all week, and so my art drive has fallen off a cliff and has tainted my whole view of the past week. Because really, on Monday & Tuesday this week I felt on fire!
I felt really good about some of the work I was doing early this week. I was on a roll! At one point I literally thought to myself that it was going amazingly well but I shouldn't admit that or I'd jinx it. I had decided to "ruin" some art, to go through my partially finished stack of paintings and just do something with them. But instead of ruining the first few I grabbed, I actually enhanced them and finished them in a way I was proud of! It truly felt like I could see some of the time and effort I've been putting in finally paying off.
On this piece specifically, I kept pushing myself. I knew the first layer of the palette knife sky/land wasn't enough--it was pretty, but boring. So I tried painting on a clear piece of plastic to practice some changes. I think that helped my confidence, although it didn't work that well really--the paint kept beading up so I couldn't get a true sense of what the final effect would be. So I decided to just go for it on the paper. I started with the grass marks in the bottom but it wasn't enough. So I added a bare tree, but hated how the branches looked--too thick. So I added some marks in green to create leaves (which in retrospect was an obviously good decision; since the land was green the tree wouldn't be bare after all!) and spattered the dark blue and orange in. That's the part I'm really proud of--I managed to charge in additional colors without creating blooms! And I got them placed in a way that truly looked like darker shadows.
So I kept going. I turned this uninspired landscape upside down and saw storm clouds, and I decided to add ground. I was pretty happy with the brush marks, and I successfully charged in additional colors a 2nd time. I was less happy with my attempt to add a light blue wash to the white spaces--it would have gone better if I'd done the light wash first, then the dark land marks over. But overall I like the effect of a stormy sky over a lot of little lakes (or maybe they're puddles?), and the way the colors blend. I'm not sure it really flows with the sky, but it was good practice and a good confidence booster.
So overall it's been a pretty dang good week. I still haven't missed a day in my 100 Days Project, and I'm 1/3 of the way through today. I pushed myself out of my comfort zone to do TWO Instagram lives with my face on screen, which I HATE to do. I applied for a new job & made it past the initial screen step too. The bad parts have been the weather--cloudy every day and no highs above freezing--and being too tired or busy to paint a couple times this week and feeling like I broke my good streak.
My goals for next week: figure the damn mat cutter out to finish my MIL's art. Paint every day, and do more than just the 100 Days Project for most of them. Stay warm, and keep focusing on the joy in art, not the profit.
