On Tuesday I decided I really wanted to try the abstract painting my tutor finished with in my online acrylic painting course. His piece was really lovely. Geometric shapes in muddied shades of orange and blue. He worked on a large canvas and painting inititally with a square tipped painting knife. And here is where it all went wrong.
Firstly, I opted to use a much smaller canvas as I didn't want to spend a lot of paint on this. Secondly, I do not have a square tipped knife. Now, I was aware of this and when I first looked at the tutorial I thought to myself I would be better using a stiff, broad brush to paint this if I wanted it to look anything like his. Sound advise that I promptly ignored when the time came. Seriously?
Lastly, colour. The impact of this picture was in large part due to the contrast of the blues and the oranges. I didn't want to use blue as I don't have a lot of blue and I am saving it for seascapes. I also do not have an orange and would need to mix one for the painting. My genius solution was to look through the old paints my mum gave me and pick two colours I'm unlikely to use a lot elsewhere, that there was a lot of, and use them. The colours I ended up with? Green and Purple. Could there be a worse combination? My heart sank at the sight of them. I suggested to myself swapping out the purple (not a colour I like), with red, but the thought of green and red seemed too.....fruit-like? Rural? I've no idea, but I ignored that suggestion too.
I began the painting and using my ill-shaped pallet knife it quickly went wrong. Made even worse by fact I hated this colour combination. Nothing about this painting pleased me and it just got worse and worse and worse.
Normally in this situation I would lose my patience and end up smearing paint all over the canvas and dumping it in the bin. It was at this point that I used the knife to effectively wreck the painting, but instead of smearing the paint as I intended I accidently scraped it across the canvas. This scraped the paint off the canvas! Suddenly I could make patterns by taking paint off. Light blub. I continued for a little while doing this, smearing and scraping. I then added some brown and yellow to it as I started to see something coming out of the chaos. It looked like houses on stilts over some sort of storm drain (which I emphasised by watering down the paint here). I tried changing the orientation of the canvas, but settled on the original orientation. I still couldn't make piece with the colours though.
When I had had enough I took a photo of it for this blog. At the last moment I had the thought of changing the picture to monochrome. And I loved it! All the smearing and scaping made it look like charcoal. The buildings came more to life and I could really see the image. I wouldn't say I loved it, but I produced something.
I hadn't really thought of doing a piece of fine art and then digitally altering it to make something new and better. This really opened my eyes to different possibilities with my art. And ways to get something good out of a bad day. Had I done this piece in charcoal on A2 paper I would have been really pleased with it. Ironic.
At the end of the day I felt a really strong urge to sketch something - people. I went through my photography books and found this image of young boys watching a skateboarder. I had originally only intended to draw the boy on the left, but I drew him so small I needed to fill the rest of the page and added in the rest (with some creative license due to space constraints). I have found that sketching like this with a colour pencil is nicer. Perhaps because it is less formal, or just the colour cheers me up. It was good to finish the day on a good note though.
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