An End and a Beginning!

The Tiger painting is finished! I know you were all skeptical (even I was) but the day has come and the painting is as done is it could ever be - I'm elated!

With the finish of the first painting in this series I had a burst of motivation and have applied to 4 artist residencies! My intention is to get into a residency to be able to work on this series some more. To basically cage myself into a studio to make SURE I get at LEAST one more painting out of this series.

You guys may not realize this but this is a very critical juncture! I have finished many first paintings of many series - I have finished NO second paintings of ANY of my series. I NEED TO CONTINUE.

So with 4 applications in and no one else to make sure I do the rest of the series but myself I decided to jump right into the next painting - residency or no residency! (It's going to be at least a month before I hear back from any of these residencies.)

With that being said HERE are the first stages of my next painting! HIPPOS!

What you're not seeing before this is the digital drawing process that basically brings me to the composition you see here. Once I have it the way I want it on the computer I project it on to the canvas and trace it from there.

This is the base color being applied and the flat background color which I'm afraid might be darker than I intended - I might go over it! MAUVE.

Anyways I'm so proud to be putting out this post. The tiger painting may be the piece of work I'm most proud of!

Tiger Progress

Just wanted to fill you in on the Tiger Painting!

The progression for this has gone from very fast to slow to nill to PICKED UP AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT pace. After planning out the painting it took a few weeks to gather up all the right supplies ie. canvas, projector, paint... and then as soon as everything had fallen into place I began the initial image placement: 

drawing from the projected image...

image skeleton is painted as well as solid background...

soon after that the base color was being applied to the image which is always a very exciting part because this is when you can begin to see your painting start to look like its final self - even if in a very simple form. 

But after all of the base color was layed down things began to slow down and stop. This is very common occurance in ALL my painting processes. I don't know why but this is a point where I usually lose interest! Maybe because it looks like a shittier version of the end product and I'm underwhelmed by it? I think so.

So in the mean time I took up a temporary job with the Ann Arbor Art Fair. For 3 months I didn't even touch this painting and it sat by it's lonesome in my room waiting for it's creator to take pity on it. 

So then about a week ago the Art Fair finally happened, it was a huge success (something I'll probably talk about in a later post) and I finally started thinking about my painting again. I picked up my brush and in one sitting tackled the girls face. It felt awesome! She looked better than I could have imagined and then I just started working on the painting everyday. So it's been a week now and so much has progressed and we are close to the end.

I don't want to show you the whole thing right before the end but in this clip you can see the progress really picking up. It's super exciting!

Thanks for the drop in!