What’s in my brain today? I don’t know. I’ve been working on my duster cape all day (it’s a Sunday) and watching the Giants lose to the Dolphins so I’m a little burnt out at the moment. That’s to be expected though because I got my Covid vaccine on Thursday and that usually wipes me out for a day. The next day that is.
I got the shot on Thursday and then had a feverish night of not sleeping very well that night. Every time I’ve got the shot the next day I feel like I have a fever, some body aches, and I get sensitive skin. I can feel my shirt rubbing up against my skin. It’s a weird feeling. But it goes away after a day.
The strange thing was that after that bad night’s sleep, despite feeling feverish, I wasn’t sleepy at all on Friday. I got some paying work done just fine but didn’t have the energy to get any of my own stuff done. That’s par for the course when I’m feeling poorly. But then on Saturday I couldn’t stop yawning. I was tired all day. I felt fine besides that.
So it was finally today, Sunday, that I got back to painting my duster. It’s funny but it has felt like it’s taking an exceptionally long time to get this duster done. I think this was the third weekend that I’ve worked on it but, if memory serves, I’ve only worked on it one day of each weekend. I think I’ve worked on it some weekdays too but I’d have to check my calendar to see for sure. Either way it feels like it’s been a while that I’ve been working on it. A month for sure but not a month straight.
I have been getting one “Dreams of Things” cover a week penciled, inked, and colored. Not the some cover but three different ones in three stages. Plus I’ve been writing seven comic strips a week and finishing and posting five of them a week. I’ve also been writing this very blog once a week.
I’ve been getting plenty of things done but since those are the things I always get done my brain sometimes doesn’t count them as being done. I feel like I haven’t gotten anything done this week. It’s strange. It’s also why I keep a calendar of the things I get done so that I can look at it and say, “See brain, I got plenty of stuff done. Quit bothering me.”
Things that I haven’t got done are: Big Ink Drawings, paintings, prints, or Gatsby illustrations. I was really close to finishing my own illustrated version of “The Great Gatsby” but then I decided to paint this duster. So sometimes I’m a little frustrated with myself that I’m not finished with Gatsby. But I knew that I had to strike when the iron was hot to get this duster painted.
I also spent some more money on fabric paint today. I spent about $60 on fabric paint already and now just bought a $20 jar of opaque white fabric paint. That’s $80 worth of paint and I also spent $80 on the coat.
I bought the opaque white fabric paint to use as a ground. I already used up a smaller jar of it on the cape but now I’m going to do some Pollack like action painting on about the bottom eight inches of the duster. That means that I’m going to drip, splash, and throw paint on it. But first I want to paint those bottom eight inches white instead of the black that it is. Otherwise you won’t see the paint very well. It’s going to take a lot of opaque white paint to cover those eight inches hence the big $20 jar.
I do like the way the eyes I was painting today on the front of the duster cape are coming out. They’re almost done but I might do a few things on them tomorrow. It was a case of me having a plan, working on the eyes a lot of the day, the eyes not looking particularly well, and then they came together in the end. That’s the way it is sometimes.
I’m a methodical artist. They means that the way something is done is important to me. I have a method. To use a sports buzz phrase it’s about “Trusting the Process.” But that’s not always easy. When the evidence of your eyes is that the thing doesn’t look very good then trusting the process can be tough.
I also didn’t plan the color of the painting out as well as I could have. The graphic design eye that I was painting was one that I drew nearly twenty years ago. It was finished and looked good but I knew I’d have to adjust some of the colors as I went along. It wasn’t going to look like the original print I made of it. I was okay with that but it meant that I was on my own without a full map to guide me.
Fabric paints are very thin and transparent. It takes a lot of coats of them to get saturated color. That is unless you mix them with opaque white. But the white makes them a more pastel color and that’s not always what I want. So sometimes it can take three or four coats until what I’m painting looks good.
There was one purple area that I was painting today that, at first, I put in as a white/purple mix but then as the day went along the color didn’t look right to me. That bothered me for a while. I decided to go over it with a darker purple but that purple was transparent so that it took me a few coats until it looked good. Part of the reason it looked good was that it had an opaque light purple under it rather than black or even the white ground. I’ve learned to work light to dark over the white ground with this fabric paint.
So it was a frustrating day watching the Giants plus a little bit of a frustrating day painting. But at least the painting came out okay in the end.