I spent this past weekend painting. Not such an odd occurrence but turns out that I haven’t finished an 18×24 inch painting in a little while. I bought five new canvases that size this winter but haven’t worked on one of them. I already have another canvas that same size on which I started a painting but never finished it. I ran into a problem that I sometimes run into where I plan out the painting so much that I get bored with it before I actually do it. That’s why I usually leave myself some room for spontaneity when I paint. But it doesn’t always work out that way. I’m pretty sure I’m going to finish that painting eventually but I haven’t in the last two months. So I decided a different approach was in order. A more spontaneous one.
Slide Heels
I’ve tried painting in a less planned out manner before. It usually doesn’t go well. I have a few finished paintings I made like that laying about the place and I can tell exactly which ones they are just by looking. They’re generally less fully realized. The advantage I had this time was all the spontaneous ink drawings that I’ve been making lately. They’re small 2.5×3.5 inch drawings that I’ve been making with a brush and ink. And I’ve made quite a few of them. About fifty or so.
My spontaneous pen drawings are different than the brush ones. With the pen drawings I’m looking to create images that I’ll eventually turn into finished pieces. With the brush drawing they just are. I don’t turn them into anything. They just exist as small drawings. I’m not even sure why that is except that little brush drawings are all about mood and shape. Those are two things that don’t scale up easily. A blob of ink that works just fine at half a centimeter tall might not work at all once I tried to remake it at ten times that size. Small ink drawings are their own thing. Line drawings on the other hand I can blow up and work with easily. That’s why I spend most of my time with them.
With this painting I decided that if I was going to get anything done I would have to use my small ink drawing approach. I have a spin brush that is a sort of scaled-up version on my normal pointed watercolor brush that I use for ink. I figured I could use that plus some liquid black acrylic on the canvas to mimic what I was doing on a smaller scale with the brush and ink. Of course the problem with this method would be that I couldn’t go backwards. Once I put paint on canvas it was there. Being this was the first time I was trying this it was a little intimidating so I decided to just dive in.
Detail Number One
I laid out some of my ink drawings on my desk for inspiration but I didn’t want to copy any of them. Then I grabbed my brush and paint. The first thing I painted was the black line on that horned robot-like creature on the left. I was quite hesitant with him and I think it shows. He’s not really on the ground and his legs are awkward. But there was no going backwards so I had to go with what I had. I glanced at my ink drawings at this point and decided to go with the arc/doorway that surrounds him. I had done something like that in one of my smaller drawings and thought it would work here.
The next thing I went for with the black paint was the woman on the right side. She’s a bit androgynous but I think of her as female. It’s the high hips. I knew that I wanted her tall and slender but not the full height of the canvas. I stopped her in mid-air not knowing what I would paint under her. It ended up being that strange stool with a face. At this point I had my initial black paint image work done. Two figures, a face/stool, and a passageway. It was time to figure out the color. None of the small ink drawings I made had color so I was stepping into a new area.
At this point there was no distinction between the sky and the sky behind the passageway. I decided to make one. I went with a thin wash of blue for both of them but a lighter blue behind the passageway. Then I wanted a more opaque look for the top sky so I went in with brush strokes of light, medium, and dark blues to indicate some clouds. After that the only solid colors left were the orange of the woman’s shirt and the green of her pants. Plus the purple on the face/stool. And a little pink in the woman’s face.
From here on in I knew I was mostly going to be using short brush strokes of color in a spontaneous way sort of like the initial black paint drawing. I kept going back and forth between the woman and the robot adding more strokes of different color. I think I first used pink and purple in the robot but over time added two yellows and a brown. It wasn’t until I finally hit him with some green that I was satisfied. The robot was definitely the hardest part of the painting to get to work.
The woman was a bit easier. She’s pretty well grounded on that stool and has a nice orange and green base to bounce the other colors off. Plus she has some interesting hair. All in all the stool was a little harder to get right than her. After all that I put in the grass. I didn’t want real grass so I went with blobs of paint in a pointillist manner. It’s mostly green on a light green wash with some red and blue in there to keep things lively. The grass is not spectacular but stays out of the way and gets the job done. I put the blue and purple city in behind the robot last. I also didn’t touch the sky anymore in the passageway.
Detail Number Two
The final thing I painted was the lines and small boxes that sit on top of everything. They’re a staple of my painting and I think they work well here. Half way through making the painting I knew I would need those lines and they would have to be red. So I kept red out of the rest of the painting except in the grass a little. The rest of the little color boxes I made as I saw fit.
The funny thing about this whole process is how long it took. Once again things took longer to do than I thought. Spontaneity didn’t save me any time. It took two days to make this painting which is the same amount of time as one of my usual ones. Oh, well.
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