Painting #220

Paint #220 did not come into existence easily. First, it was started 3 different times and each time I tried a completely different painting. Abandoned attempt #1 was a vase with a flower and abandoned attempt #2 was a pepper cut in half. Neither of these will see the light of day. This is not a good trend or habit.

For my third attempt, I decided to try the homework exercise of painting something outside your window. This exercise brings up all sorts of insecurities. Plus, there are too many options and I really struggle with composition. Given all of this, I decided that I was going to find joy in this assignment, dammit.

I went around almost all of the windows of the house to see and think about what would be good to paint. I took a lot of pictures. Many of them were at weird angles. When I tried to crop them into a square, most of them did not work. Still it was a good exercise and I mostly enjoyed it. I also played with looking out the windows, looking out the window using a viewfinder, and looking out the window through the camera lens. It was interesting to see how that changed things. The picture which cropped the best had a cat in it. Many of my pictures had a cat in them, since each time I opened a new window one of the orange cats would appear. 

When it came time to paint, I decided that I would complete and present the finished painting no matter what. I also started with a thumbnail sketch. It would be better if I took a little more time and represented the values better, but at least doing/thinking about the sketch has me slowing down to try and see.

There was so much detail to figure out. I wish I was better at just focusing on the important items. Hopefully that will come with practice. At this point, I took an extended break.

Later in the day, I finished it.

#220 - Cat in Window - 6" x 6" - hardboard

While there are things I like about it, I am a tad annoyed that the window looks twisted. My drawing wasn't, but somehow in the execution I twisted things up a bit. There were a lot of decisions to make. The most confusing one was how to represent the side of the house peaking out between the lilacs. I don't like what I tried, but trying to fix it would have made it worse.

Conclusion - - This was a good exercise that stretched me in good ways.