One Is a Lovely Number

In Kat’s online class, it’s one stroke per color week. This is a good way to slow down and think. The goal is to paint a simple object by mixing a color and painting one stroke with that color. You finish the entire painting in this manner, or you try to! It can be easy to forget that and use a color that works well more than once before you realize it. I like to mix colors, so I enjoy this. Plus, it’s good practice mixing colors so that more of the paint is on the brush, rather on the palette. I am still marveling at how much better it goes when I don't have a goopy paint brush. In the past when I've tried to not have goopy paint, my brush would be too dry. Scratchy, dry paint strokes feel awful to paint. It's like the visual equivalent of fingernails on a chalkboard.

When I took Carl’s class at Wet Paint, he would mix premix puddles of color with a palette knife before he started a painting. He also used the matte medium, which thinned the paint color. You can build layers this way and/or you can smooth value transitions. I found it hard to control my paint. Now that I understanding grabbing the paint in the brush better, this might go better.

While it’s a bit frustrating that this one, seemingly small, thing has taken 3 1/4 years to fix, I am also reminded hearing about someone taking mandolin lessons from Peter Ostroushko years ago. Apparently, Peter began both his beginner classes and his master classes with how to strum the strings. I like the idea that no matter the level of competence an artist has achieved, there is always the opportunity to go deeper and learn more about each component or skill involved with the thing you do.

To a certain extent, I do that in my work, accounting. I am a process person. Once I have set up a system for a client, over time, I will continue to refine and optimize it until I don’t see any way to improve it further. This is the fun part of my work and it’s a balancing act of implementing change, getting benefits from the changes, and making refinements at some time in the future. This is what I enjoy about my work versus the auto-pilot parts of my work, which aren’t that fun. Most people think accounting is all the auto-pilot part, but it's not or it doesn't have to be!

Back to painting.........

I overworked this, because I enjoyed mixing colors. With my paint strokes, there are too many which are similar, i.e. same angle, direction, length, and so on. I am liking the oranges I mixed!  This was a blood orange, so there were some parts along the edges where were a really dark orange.

#308 - One Stroke Per Color Orange - 6" x 6" - paper

By the way, this really is my experience almost every time I take a picture to post on this blog. My picture-taking process is move the step stool in front of the windows, place the painting on top of the bench, move the cat one or more times, and take the picture.

One last thing, I subscribe to The Painter's Key's, thanks to Kat's recommendation. A letter / blog post comes out 2 times per week. Many of them are gems. I really like the one for today.