“Mister Sleep” 24×36 inch painting
For the last two weeks I wrote about painting. This week I’m also going to write about painting. That’s because I jumped right into another one. The first painting took me nine days of work. I’ve put four days into this one and I think I can get it done today on the fifth day. I picked a simpler image for this one because I didn’t think I had nine more painting days in me right now.
As a matter of fact I almost painted this painting first. I drew up a bunch of sketches before I painted the first painting and liked this one. Strangely at that time I thought it was too simple an image to start with. I wanted something more complicated. That’s why I went with the face for the nine day painting which I prophetically named “Around Nine”.
Usually I name my painting in the sketch stage. I just pick a couple of words or a phrase that comes into my head as I look at the painting. Most often the names are like “Around Nine.” That’s a name that really has nothing to do with the image and is almost random. I do that because I like my stuff to have names so I can refer to them as something but I don’t have to worry about coming up with the “Perfect” name. I think that stops a lot of artists from naming things. They never come up with, or even want to bother trying to come up with, the perfect name. So I remove perfectionism from the equation.
The name I came up with at the sketch stage for this week’s painting is “Wind Sore.” That’s what popped into my head. But in a rather rare move for me I decided to change the name as I worked on the painting. That’s because the word “Sleep” that’s in the painting now wasn’t in the original sketch. The word and its placement came to me as I was transferring the drawing to canvas. That’s what the name “Mister Sleep” came to me and became the painting’s name.
My paintings are about finding meaning in life and I often think of them as being from the dreamworld. That’s what we artists do. We walk the edges of the dreamworld that is the human consciousness and come back with stuff to show everybody else. This is a character from the dreamworld.
As is my usual process with these the first thing I did on the canvas was to draw a grid so that I could grid up the drawing I had made. Then I printed out a copy of the drawing with a grid on it and used the grid to more easily remake the drawing on the canvas. The grid gives you all sorts of reference points to follow when transferring the drawing.
This time I also remembered to make the canvas grid with a blue pencil. For “Around Nine” I forgot that and drew it in regular pencil. It’s easier when the grid is blue so it stands apart for the regular pencil I make the actual drawing in.
The next step was to paint the line. For that I use a Dioxazine Purple which is dark enough to appear as black but give me a livelier line than if I used black. This is also the step that was a little different than the last painting. The simpler the drawing the more the lines have to be exact. When painting the line of the last one I knew I was eventually going to be remaking the line in a later stage. With this one I knew there would be less remaking of the line so that I’d have to get it right at the beginning. That took a little time and doing.
The next step was the color sketch. Usually I have this done before I start the painting but in this case I didn’t. I could not get the colors right up until now. I digitally made a bunch of color sketches but none of them looked right. Then the night after I finished painting the line it came to me. I opened up the document I was doing the color sketch in and figured out the colors in about fifteen minutes. This was after working on them for a few hours in previous days.
With the colors figured out I painted them onto the canvas over two days. Once again I had to be very precise. The yellow stripes at the top and the orange stripes at the bottom even needed to be painted twice. The paint was a little too transparent for me after one application and I could see parts of the grid showing through. Sometimes I’m okay with that and sometimes I want the paint to have more presence. This time I want with more paint and more texture.
For those three bottom orange stripes I even masked out the edges with tape. That’s something I rarely do but I wanted them to be as straight as possible. A taped edge doesn’t have the body of a painted one (which is why I usually avoid them) but the second application of paint helped with that.
I knew this painting was going to live and die with a the stuff that I was going to paint after the initial colors were painted. That’s all the color stripes, color blocks, color strokes, and color tick marks that I make. That’s all the stuff that isn’t planned in the beginning. Yesterday I put in a full day of working on those and I have another day to go. Those marks take up a small percentage of the canvas but take a long time to figure out. It has to be done mark by mark.
This is where digital helps. I take a picture of the painting in progress and then use Procreate and my iPad to draw new marks right over the picture. That way I don’t have to make mistakes on the canvas. I still do make some mistakes and have to fix them but it’s a lot fewer and smaller mistakes than if I didn’t use digital.
Mister Sleep is almost done. It will be long done by the time this posts so I’ll have a finished image of it. Last night I digitally figured out a lot of the last bits of painting so hopefully I’ll get it done today.