Month: October 2023

3–Moonlight Migration

~ EV ~ 5 Comments

I’ve finished the third in the series and decided to call it “Moonlight Migration.” I feel like I lost some steam after I passed the halfway point with this one. Instead of letting it get me down and quitting it indefinitely, I started a new painting. The new one is bigger, was supposed to be loose and experimental but turned out to be just as “designed” as my others. I guess that’s just the way my painter’s brain works. Really, I’ve only been sketching a rough composition on all these paintings I’ve recently done, and the shapes in them feel like they are kind of appearing out of the ether. I’m just pushing the brush.

To be honest, I skipped a few days of painting and went through a little depression because I let myself fall back into old habits. But I’m trying to look at what I did objectively, and it’s helping me get back on track. What I’ve realized is that the artist’s journey, pretty much any journey, is not linear. You don’t go from point A to point B to point C and so on, incrementally “improving” or “progressing”. There are a lot of ups and downs, sidetracks and dead-ends, successes and failures, all in some way guiding us in the direction we need to go, and I figure my main goal is just to be better off and more in line with my idea of a painter this time next year. My main goal is just to do the work. My main goal is to PAINT.

What are you working on? What are you working toward as a creator??

New Watercolor Series

~ EV ~ 2 Comments

Diving back into my favorite medium and challenging myself to come up with and to stick to a new system of painting!

I’ve decided to plan out a brand new 25-painting series called “Home Sweet Home.” All I am focusing on is painting every day–this first week, I’ll be painting at least 2.5 hours a day, and as the weeks progress, I’ll allot more time to sitting at the desk. These first few weeks I am concentrating on just sitting down to paint. I’ve already completed two paintings and am almost finished with the third.

This first one is called “October World.” With this piece I was pretty lax and casual. Loose sketch looking at a photograph and basically learning how to paint works again. I’m learning as I move from one piece to another that the middle crap stage of the painting is the part where I’m most likely to shoot myself in the foot–I either doubt my artistic choices and end up taking forever to move on or I straight up quit. With these first two pieces, I’ve realized to just keep slogging forward, even if I think I made the wrong move or I don’t like the outcome of a particular layer.

This next one is “Luna Bird.” I like how this one turned out, for the most part. But I do think the bird at the top of the tree doesn’t quite work. I’m still happy with the finished painting and I’d really like to revisit the way I did the tree leaves on the big willow–it was pretty fun, and this one, on the whole was pretty effortless.

This third one will feature a family of trolls making their way through the woods. I’m thinking of titling it “Silent Migration.” This one was inspired by my kids, who always let their imaginations run away with them at night, and every little sound sparks the question “what was that sound outside?”

I’m also experimenting with working on multiple paintings at a time. We’ll see how that goes…