February

This was a very interesting month for me.

For those just tuning in, the last couple of months of 2014 were miserable. I hit the breaking point with Starbucks, and I quit, but even with the light at the end of the tunnel in view I still put aside my art. 

I spent some time getting back on my feet. My pattern is to come off of deep slumps straight into crazy overcommitment, and this time was no different: halfway through January, I looked around and found myself staring down five deadlines and a convention packed into the shortest month of the year. But instead of the blind screaming bullrush I tend to revery to in situations like that, I did something different.

I hit this month like I haven't hit any prolonged period of time since my senior year of college. I was working around 35 hours a week at my day job, coming home, and making art, working deliberately along a do-to-list. With things laid out along a timeline, the usual panic was subdued: it actually felt good working until 12 or 1, even as I got to averaging five or so hours of sleep a night, because I could feel myself making progress. Saturdays were my opportunity to get a whole day in, often thirteen to fifteen hours, and on Sundays I worked for a couple of hours before taking a half-day off. It was awesome.

It was awesome, but listen, believe me when I say I know this isn't sustainable practice. I broke, more than once, and spent a scattering of days doing nothing in order to recharge. Working at the absolute edge of my capabilities meant that when one thing went wrong (having to stay several hours late at work a couple of days in a row) I had a… bit of a moment. I had to compromise, too - I had initially meant to do all five pieces as oil paintings, but it became very clear very quickly that it was an impossibility, and two of the five pieces wound up as drawings. 

But all of them are good, and they didn't exist twenty days ago.

I'm glad to have done it, but I'm glad to be done with it, too. Running headlong like that is exhausting; I have to be on point for every brush stroke. The risk I run when working like this is finishing so drained that I stop making art again - but as crazy as I had to get to hit each deadline, something about working so deliberately and producing pieces I'm so proud of has kept me from burnout at the end of it.

I have a lot of exciting things on my plate for the spring. There's a commission I've been sitting on for literally over a year that I cannot wait to get started on; there's a handful of Silmarillion minipaintings I have planned that might wind up being studies for larger pieces; there's the two Month of Love drawings that are waiting patiently to be done in oils. I've been rolling around personal pieces and projects and now, free from that soul-killing job and a rapid-fire month of deadlines, I'm so excited to get them started!

SmART School Week 6

Rebecca had told me to do one more color study off of her correction, and bring that into class to confirm that I understood where she wanted me to take my color.

This class was mostly me getting the go-ahead on getting the painting itself started: my study was more or less there, and the corrections Rebecca had were minimal (which is good, because something with the Dropbox screwed up and the paint over files disappeared).

So I started the painting.

There is nothing quite like the hatred and despair of a first scrub-in, where everything is awful and nothing works. Usually it's not quite so dramatic, but this was a palette I was still adjusting to, and I've been fighting off a cold/fever for a bit now which of course makes things harder to be positive about.

Usually when I get like this, where my emotional response to my piece is ">:|", the answer is I have to pick a part and just render the crap out of it, to give me something to feel good about.

I kind of lost the drawing in the hand I was working on, and clearly didn't get to the left hand at all, but this makes me happy. Cutting into the hair and getting in the volume of the flesh has gotten my momentum rolling again after what seemed like five years of color studies, haha.

Beyond working on this, I also started thinking about my next piece. I had originally been intending to work on a commission for a friend, and had even taken reference - but it's another ethereal lady with a tree, and doing two of those in a row seemed like a poor choice. So I started looking through my stock of unused thumbs and unexplored projects.

What I found was the original set of thumbnails I did for the IMC from the summer before last. I'd dropped these in favor of what eventually became The Long Path, and for good reasons - but there was something about these that made me come back. Rebecca chose number one, and I started to gather reference for my frankenstein as the week ended.

I have more to do before this is ready to go to drawing, and I need to figure out what part of my gesture is actually achievable by human bodies, but the heart of the painting - Oberon's gesture - is there. Exciting!

The long and winding road

I know I talked a lot about making mistakes at just about every turn in my post about this piece, but I didn't actually... give examples. In the interest of science, therefore, here's my documentation of the process of the painting itself, with helpful notes on what I was doing, and what I did wrong. It's not so much that I like making my failures public spectacle, than it is how much I value marking my progress down for my own future edification and understanding.

See that face? That, boys and girls, is called 'losing the drawing'. Also, at this point, I had no idea what was going in the wicker ball; also also, I had no real clue what my value structure actually was.

I threw a dead bird in there because it seemed like a good idea, and painted out the eye, and knocked out some more of the orange, and started on the wicker. Can we talk for a second about how absolutely stupid it is to paint front-to-back with something like a wicker ball? Especially since I didn't even have what we'd be seeing through it referenced or drawn. God. 

Well, enough of that horror show: time to repaint the face and deal with that window.

The hair was terrible in shape and feel, and I finally accepted this and started to paint it out to redo at a later time. However, the shape I wound up carving out was right, somehow, and so I stopped.

The face itself still needed work. I also started in on the background, with some better color and value, but still not quite correct on either count.

There, that looks a lot better, doesn't it? At some point in this mess I referenced, drew, and painted in the arm and part of the midsection that one could see through the wicker ball.

 

I was absolutely and truly furious about the way I'd painted in the hair, so I backed away from it until I could look at it without seething.

When I came back, I decided to avoid the problem areas and work on something I knew I could execute well: hands (and flesh).

I like hands~

Hands, I know I can execute. They require care and proper effort, but I can rely on my own ability and that is a comfort.

Comforts like that are necessary when throwing myself against, say, some deeply uncooperative hair.

Time to step away from the hair again so I can work her clothes up from their first pass, finally. (value structure? what value structure?)

Oh, that value structure. 

Now that I figured that out, time to second-pass the wicker ball, because the flat colors the first time around aren't... okay.

At this point, I liked the face and the hands and hated the rest of the painting. Or, well - I was bored by the rest of the painting, and furious at how long it had taken to get so close to the end, and how at a loss I was for what to do to it to make it interesting.

So, in a fury, I threw pure cadmium red on my 000 brush and went to town.

As it turned out,  it was exactly what I needed.

I did so much wrong, and took the long way around so many times, that it's more than a little frustrating to look back on. But it came out in the end, and what I achieved in spite of myself is something to be proud of - and to learn from.

I have made some poor decisions

 
First: for a painting which was executed in a string of bad choices just about start to finish, I am incredibly pleased by the outcome.

Having said that - this was a long, miserable process of a painting, though for different reasons and in different ways than Holding the Pass was. That painting was too hard, an exercise in fighting through over-ambition and improving the hard way; Tithe, on the other hand, was just tedious.


(oh. its title is Tithe. it finally told me.)

Well - 'just' tedious is not quite correct. It was definitely boring to work on, and it definitely had parts that were finicky and delicate and utterly mind-numbing to do, but so much of what I hated about working on this painting is how poorly planned it was. Oh sure, I did a 'good' drawing - but what I did in that drawing was the figure, and the wicker ball. The dead bird suspended in the ball was a very late addition, which I came to after I'd painted in almost everything else; the strings were thrown in on impulse almost at the end, in a fit of rage at and disgust in how boring a painting it was. That those two things are so important, that the strings are literally the key to make this painting work, and they were afterthoughts -

Yeah, I'm left more than a little stunned at how well it came out.

Relearning lessons is always an… interesting experience, but it's nice to know that I'm past that particular brand of self-flagellation such a thing would have sparked even half a year ago. I was certainly angry at myself as I realized each mistake in turn, but in the past it would have touched off a truly savage bout of self-recriminations and mental beatdowns. This time around, there was, as I said, a fair amount of anger, but there were no spirals of rage or stirrings of deep-seated self-doubt: I knew that I was better than the mistakes I was making, and at each one I stepped up and moved onward, even if it took a couple of days away from the easel to facilitate.

It's startling to realize, but this process makes me think I've taken another step toward earning my stripes. I'm not a 'gifted' artist but I've put a lot of time and effort into being a good painter, and looking at this painting I know I'm succeeding in that regard.

I made this painting come together - I did. The searing spark of inspiration that made Tristan and Isolde flow through my fingers, the bright clear picture in my head that Dawn's Herald came from, none of that was there. I just worked on it, and it wasn't fun or easy, but I took each mistake and bad choice and I fixed them. The bird, the strings at the end: those I'll attribute to that place in my head that sometimes gives me my paintings, but those couldn't have gotten there without the painting itself being there, and it was only there because I made it happen.

There are, as always, things that could be better - better executed, more polished, less generic, just one rung up and it's out of reach for now - but so much is going right here, in the overall sense, that I'm just going to sit here and feel triumphant and maybe a little bit smug at this painting that sat there for a few months and mocked me.

(Next time I paint something this - simple? uncluttered? - I am doing it at least five inches smaller each side, because one of the things I hated about this was how much boring/tedious space there was to cover. Though it was so nice to be able to work on a face that size…)

There and Back Again: Days 119-126

Day 119: This is not really something 'I'd do', but it fell out of my pencil and I really do love it. The gesture of her, especially - though I know the  anatomy leaves a lot to be desired.

Day 120: This is... this is a drawing I really love. A lot of things came together here, and my eternal love for devotional art really clicked within the drawing.

Day 121: Action! Anatomically impossible though it may be! I really enjoy drawing drapery in a few very simple action lines. And hair is always my favorite.

Day 122: This is a... strange drawing. I don't even know - and I'm pretty sure that all of that stippling constitutes cheating on my hour minimum. I still like the outcome even so?

Day 123: Here is, very simply, me enjoying myself. Boneless arms - or elegance+3?

Day 124: Apparently November 1st is International Self-portrait Day, and I found this out in time to do it as my drawing for this project! I'd done a self-portrait before, in September, and here's the difference two months makes:

Day 125: I slipped back into the horse-faces I used to draw to the exclusion of any decent profiles here. I like her hair, though? And the fall of her cloak.

Day 126: Aaaand here's what happens when a drawing just doesn't work. I was sick and tired and I really just didn't being any discipline to bear on this.