Working on a painting. Another real painting. I just sold a big piece, for rather a lot, (and once Mr. Check arrives, I will be able to pay a number of Mr. Bills, like VISA, and Ellen, and the Dark Angel of Rent) and after I was done dancing around the house whooping, it occurred to me that I hadn’t done a larrrge piece for awhile, and that my stock of acrylic originals had taken a plunge in the last month or so. So more or less on a whim, I pulled out one of the 24 x 36 canvases in the closet and started slapping paint at it.

My normal method of doing a physical painting is pretty damn anal. I do a digital sketch, get it all laid out, transfer the sketch to a canvas via projector, then build it up in a set of glazes. And it works pretty well–it’s how I’m doing the Frogscape, for example, and it’s good for commissions because the client knows pretty much exactly what they’re gonna get.

This one, however, I had a vague notion that maybe I wanted to paint something with tree bark. And that was all I knew, so I picked up a pallete knife and just started slathering paint on, alternateing Payne’s Gray and Titanium White. It was a much more spontaneous sort’ve thing than usual–for example, I wound up flipping it over when I realized that the part I’d been thinking was the sky had to be the tree, because I’d gotten all these bark textures in the drips. In a way, it’s almost like the megascribble thing–alternating dark and light, without much of a plan, and just building up out of whatever happens. And I got a weird little composition going, and then I decided to add a Raw Umber wash, and that’s how I found myself finger painting, which I hadn’t done for years, Painter 7 not being conducive to such things.

By the time it’s done, assuming it doesn’t get abandoned partway through, as it occasionally the fate of paintings, I’ll probably return to anal detail again, but it’s always fun to just slap paint around occasionally.

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