My Creative Journey 11 + Watch Me Paint! Ep. 04

mikesthoughts (58)in #painting • 6 years ago

Every journey begins with a step...and continues with countless more. There is no end to the creative path. Only progress. To get better you have to do. Your skills, your mind, your art will not get better unless you try. And trying means you will fail a lot. But, if you keep at it, eventually you will triumph, break through, and be where you want to be. Here is another step on my journey.

Morning everyone...or afternoon...or maybe evening, depending on when you see this :)

I decided to take it a bit easier last night, mainly because I was exhausted after the last week of pushing so hard. Also because I ran out of paper to paint on, hehe. I need to remember this is a marathon...which is so hard because I want this to work so bad. I mean, in three months I've gotten this far skill-wise, and the ideas in my head want to pop out, all I need is the skills to make it happen.

Instead of heading home after my regular coffee shop closed, I headed out with some friends from there to another coffee shop. Why...I don't know. I guess we all still wanted to chill, but at a different place. I was, like I said, exhausted from dealing with, well, my depression and a nasty downturn (If you want to read about the fall and the comeback, It's the little things, and, remember to take care of yourself, is where the details about that are) but I still wanted to be around people. And I still wanted to draw. Which was cool with them because so did one of my buddies. So we sat there for a while sketching faces.

It was nice to play in a different medium again. I've been really focused on painting, and those have been really bold, details coming from the minute bits of white space and scratchy half-dry brushing, so going back to a single small point was refreshing. I think I'm going to do a lot more of it, since I need to start doing studies of hands, eyes, etc. to get down the form of them. Building, building, building :)

The first one was a real bust...no pun intended. I was trying to ride off the wave of the sketch and do something similar...not taking into account the brush size and my stroke abilities, hehe. But, as always, I was cool with it. Progress comes slowly sometimes, and sometimes we overreach our abilities. The best we can do in those situations is learn from them and take those lessons into the next situation. It could have been something with the right strokes...but...moving on...

Eyes...I love eyes. Windows to the soul and all that. How to get them to look and feel alive...I mean, they're not just white globes with black pupils...where and how do you put life into them? That's what I was doing with this painting. That really up close, pay attention to me, kind of look. I imagine this on a canvas like 3 times this size, so you can see the whole face, get the whole thing...but you'd have to do it from like 20 feet away, lol. I think I really do want to paint on some huge canvases. People notice those. And to paint them, the physical action of all the strokes could be quite therapeutic, hehe. Like boxing, or sword fighting, but with paper and paint. There was a movie that compared those things together, sword fighting and painting (writing a Chinese character in this case) called Hero. Such a beautiful movie...not sure if I agree with the underpinning moral message, but, definitely cool to watch.

If you want to see me paining it, guess what?! I got a fast forward video of me putting paint to paper :)

Watch me Paint! Ep.04

Music: Loco Lobo

And my last painting for the evening. I kinda got a kick out of this one. I put away all inspirations and just ran with it. I put out some lines, then some more, and pretty soon this came out. I didn't realize that I was mimicking the first painting until the very end when they were up next to each other. Except, with my own flavor :) I'm actually pretty proud of this one. Mainly because I took the look back from the first one, and made it stick. At least I think so. The mouth is probably the weakest element in this one...which, looking at the sketches I started with, isn't much of a surprise.

Something else that's beginning to get my interest is the border/background. What can I put in there to emphasize a point, or direct attention. Strokes, solid, objects? Things are starting to get complex in my head, which is a double edged sword. Getting ideas out is getting harder because I'm having to consider more, in order to make it look the way I want it to. Evolution of the process and all that :)

As always, I'm always curious to hear what people think about my work :)
Thanks for dropping by and looking/watching/reading. Hope you enjoyed what you saw!