Two Week Painting Hiatus Is Over

I can see why daily or at least frequent painting is so helpful.  It felt a bit strange and foreign to pick up a paint brush after 2 weeks.  On Friday, I did a couple of drawings in the hopes that I'd have time to paint on Saturday.  First attempt was a dog.  I really, really, really did not like how I started, so I abandon ship after about 5 minutes.  When I went bad to look at this later, I think I made the right call.

My second attempt was Wingnut.  This is an 8 inch by 8 inch painting.  It's hard figuring out how to paint his colors, so I went a little crazy again.  What I'm most pleased about is the shape of his face and that his gaze is in the same direction as the picture. I also like how his eyes turned out.

One challenge is that his back and sides have a lot of dark, dark, black/brown.  It really would be better to just let the black gesso background represent these parts as is, but for some reason it's hard to do that.  If I had to put this to music, think of Elmer Fudd signing "kill the rabbit, kill the rabbit". Now replace that lyric with "fill the canvas, fill the canvas".  It almost feels like cheating to not fill in large sections of the canvas with "real" paint.  I think I need to challenge myself on this and paint something with a large empty section!