This isn’t the painting I set out to paint, but I forced myself to see it through once it got going. The whole reason why I started this one is because I was dissatisfied with the way one of my other paintings was working out, so leaving yet another work abandoned seemed silly.
I don’t think it’s finished yet, but I’m not sure if I’ll push it much further either.
We spent the last weekend camping up at Mambray Creek. It’s the first time I’ve been camping in a long while, and it was such a lovely place. The wildlife was a highlight.
Although I took my paints with me, I forgot to bring my usual brushes! That caused a bit of panic, but I found that I had a Chinese calligraphy brush on me. I usually only use the calligraphy brushes with black ink, so I decided to make the best of matters and create a painting in greyscale.
When I finished the above painting I realised that I’d probably done myself a favour by forgetting the other brushes. Working in just black ink meant that I didn’t need to juggle the complexities of colour. I was able to work things up in tones, and if I got something in the wrong spot I was able to water it down or build up the things around it in order to make up for the mistake. That would be much harder to correct if I put the wrong colour down!
My suspicions were confirmed when I made an attempt at painting a vista scene over the hills using my watercolours. I ran into problems of managing colour, depth of field, and the problem of picking subject matter that didn’t have well defined forms. I abandoned that painting after not too long.
On Sunday I felt a desire to draw rocks.
At first I started this painting with a view straight into a wall of rock, and not long in I was going a little crazy. John however pointed out this view, just facing a little further up the track from where I was seated, which made for a much easier composition. With the shape of the left tree and the negative space around the rock edges it made it much easier to work out what I was looking at when I looked up and down between my painting and the reference.
Overall, a fun weekend with some nice art to boot. And I might even be convinced to go out and walk and enjoy the great outdoors more often now that I have some confidence that I can get some worthwhile paintings done.
Here’s some fan art for the marvelously fun and kitschy webcomic I Was Kidnapped By Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space! Lots of comics seem to be having planned breaks in the last week or so, and I was hoping to do fanart for other titles. I only got one done – I’m glad it was this one.
This was going to be a fan-comic to fit in with where the story was up to when it ended the last chapter. Then I realised my punchline had already been used in the comic, so I went on to just make that punchline into a nice painting.
