What? Did I actually type that out loud?
It doesn't happen very often, but yes -- sometimes I think I'd like to try to paint a picture. I never have a clue what/how I want to do...and I usually end up not doing it at all...but today I figured what the heck -- I'm going to give it a try.
This morning I started doodling while I was half-watching a movie (that I've seen before). I kept playing with it and adding more and more elements. As you can see, it has a lot more to it than my "normal" near-stick figure doodles or my super plain creatures.
After a little bit I got tired of the movie and I went into the studio to use the computer to find some variations on a song from the movie. I ended up spending a lot of time on YouTube and at iTunes and Amazon. I got a bunch of songs and made a new compilation CD for the music player in the temporary studio. PLUS, I managed to avoid working on the labels/printing/boxes for the Tookies. (I will do them tomorrow...but I did realize I was doing some avoiding today.)
Then I went "shopping" in the basement -- I knew I had at least one small blank canvas down there somewhere. I discovered the bin that held the canvas and much to my surprise there were about 5 or 6 canvas boards. I decided to use one of them instead of a "real" canvas...just in case I lost interest or really hated the project halfway through.
The funny thing about these canvas boards is that they have a picture outlined on them. On the back is (I suppose) what your finished painting is meant to look like. They remind me of paint-by-numbers without the numbers. I must have bought them at an estate sale -- the one that had a bunch of used brushes and a paint set and several paintings that I later repurposed into collages.
So I gave the canvas board a coat of paint to prime it and cover up the images. Then I left it to dry and got ready to work on the plaster cloth that I didn't do last night.
The first thing I need to do to the Atomic Fireball Happy Hour guy is add more layers of plaster cloth to strengthen the Happy Hour tin that is his chest area. It is a time consuming process but most of the guys on the save-it-for-later shelf are in the very earliest stages and they need a lot of work. It also takes a long time because now I am trying to add wet plaster cloth to very dry old plaster cloth and the older stuff just soaks up every bit of water in the new stuff.
And tonight it has been "get back in there and work on the painting" time.
I found that (luckily) I could still see through most of the paint and I was very surprised that I was starting to see a creature forming out of all of the still life items...just like when I re-use paintings for collages. I was not expecting that at all.
Then I was wondering what I could put in the background and I spotted the perfect circle template. Perfect, indeed!
I added a bunch of circles an this is how it turned out.
The color in these photos is way off and I wanted to remember what color I used as the base so I scanned the canvas board -- this is closer to the actual color.
And much later (after feeding the cats and having my dinner) I came in to paint more and I started to outline one of the circles then I realized I would be covering up any shading I was doing now so I switched gears and filled in a background base color around everything, leaving a little bit of space for shading. Yeah...right.
