Too Much Painting

Yesterday, I did way, way, way too much painting.  Most of it involved getting ready for winter. I put touch up paint on two door jams and scrapped and painted two boards on the north side of the house, which were peeling..

Earlier this fall, we had our front steps replaced.  Any day now, the hand rail might be installed.  I needed to scrape, prime and paint around the new steps.  This side was easy, since it was mostly painting new wood.

On this side, I needed to use a heat gun to get the many layers of old paint removed.  Painting the new post was a lot of work.  Of course, I was the one that wanted it to mirror the posts between the windows on the front porch. The facing boards are cedar, so I'll wait until next spring to paint those.

Between all of it, I used 4 different colors of exterior paint.  It all got done, but it was too dark to take a picture.

Oh yes, I also painted this. I mostly worked on it when I was waiting for the primer to dry.

My donut looks like a doughnut!  I also wrote down 3 rules that I intend to follow this week.  While painting:

• Stop and squint at least 3 times.  
• Back up and look at the painting at least once. 
• Flash eyes between the painting and subject matter at least once.  

The backing up and squinting is something that I've been hearing from Kat since I started taking lessons. Most of the time, I do okay with squinting, but sometimes I forget to do it!.  The other two, I don't really do. In class, I've noticed that most of us have not been stopping and taking a break.  

I think it's another brain-thing, like the paint stokes.  It was really, really hard to do paint strokes from side to side, the second time that I painted the tomato, even when I wanted to do exactly that. I want to stop. I want to take a break. I want to see the values, but in the middle of painting it's hard to do.

In order to form some new, better habits, those are my painting rules this week. I wrote them on an index card and hung it up in my painting area.