Around Nine is the name of this painting.
Last week I got to write about starting a painting so this week I’m going to write about finishing a painting. Why? Because I finished a painting! Its title is “Around Nine.”
First of all it took me nine days to finish the painting. That doesn’t count the run up of figuring out what I was going to paint, making sketches and drawings, and doing digital color sketches. It was nine days to do the physical painting.
I would start the painting at about 8AM (sometimes a little earlier), work until noon, take a lunch break, get back to it around 1PM, and work until about 4PM (maybe 5). I’d usually have dinner at 5PM. I spent nine out of eleven days doing this to get the painting done.
You can see why I have only gotten one painting done over the last three years. That’s a lot of time.
I also notice that I’m not young anymore. Back in my twenties I used to routinely work those hours but also get back to work at 6PM and work until 9PM. Occasionally 10PM. I can’t do that anymore. But I was never a “Pull an all-nighter” person. 10PM was always my limit. I am better off getting some sleep and starting again in the morning than trying to stay up late.
It took me a few days to get used to painting too. When I paint I have to bend and contort my body a little bit to be in the right position to make certain brush strokes. My brush strokes are also, at times, precise and deliberate. This takes a lot of concentration and control and it took a me a while to get used to that again. It has been a bit.
When I started this painting I didn’t think that it would take me nine days. I thought it would take from five to seven days. Out of all the sketches I made I picked one of a face because I thought it would be a simple image to paint. It was not. It took a lot of painting and refining to get it how I wanted it. Figuring out and finishing the eyes alone took me about three quarters of a day. That makes sense now but wasn’t something I thought about beyond, “I have to figure out how to do those eyes” back in the beginning.
There was also a lot more cleaning of the paint filled plastic cubbies, that I wrote about las week, than I ever thought about. When estimating how long a painting is going to take you have to take into account cleaning up time too. I didn’t remember that.
Just like last week I’m going to mention an old professor of mine, Nicholas Marsicano. Back in my art school days we were discussing paint and he told me to just think of cheap paint as a different color. By that he meant that there is nothing wrong with cheap paint. It just has less pigment in it so that it’s not the same color as a more expensive paint with more pigment in it. There is nothing wrong with cheap paint. It’s just different. Plus cheap earth tones are the same as expensive ones.
As a consequence I’ve always had both cheap tubes of paint and expensive tubes of paint. It all depends on what color I want. After not painting very much for a few years I noticed another difference between cheap and expensive paints. The tubes.
The cheap paint is in plastic tubes. When you squeeze the tubes the paint comes out but then the tube snaps back to its original form. The expensive paint is in flexible metal tubes. When you squeeze them they don’t snap back. This means that there is a lot more air in the plastic tube. As a consequence some of the cheap paint dried out in the tube. I had four dried out tubes of cheap paint. Oh, well.
I ran into one of the truisms of making art that slowed me down. If you make a small drawing and blow it up all of the problems in it will be magnified. That’s what I ran into with the eyes and the shoulders.
My original pencil drawing was 6×9 inches. The ink drawing I made from that was 11×17 inches. The final painting is 24×36 inches. In the smaller drawings the eyes weren’t exactly symmetrical. They were off by a tiny fraction of an inch. After I transferred the drawing to the big canvas and painted the line of the eyes something looked off.
When I got to trying to finish the eye I didn’t like what I was seeing. The tiny fraction of an inch that they were off in the small drawing was now at least a quarter of an inch and was very visible to me. I had to redraw the right eye to match the left eye and that’s why the whole process of finishing the eyes took so long. I should have made sure everything was okay after I transferred the drawing to canvas but I missed it.
A similar thing happened with the shoulders. The left should was just a little bit off and had to be redone after I painted in the line. This was a bit easier than the eye but it still took a little bit of time.
This painting also has what I call “Asymmetrical symmetry” in it. At first glance it looks symmetrical but on closer inspection it’s not. The hair is not the same on both sides, nor are the face triangles, and the hat is asymmetrical too. But those eyes can’t be too far off from symmetrical. Nor the shoulders.
In the end I like how this painting came out. I’m going to not look at it for a few days and then look at it to see if it needs any other finishing touches. I have a feeling that this one won’t but I’ll give it some time to see.
Meanwhile I’ve got the next painting in mind. It’s a painting that’s simpler than this one. I actually thought about starting with the simpler one but then thought I wanted something more complicated. Then this one ended up more complicated than I initially thought. I could use some simple right now.