Wednesday, February 27, 2013

10 day painting challenge with Jane Spakowsky on Facebook

About 6 days ago, Jane (also known as "Gritty Jane") set up a challenge on Facebook to do a painting a day for 10 days. 

Many people in the challenge are up to Day 5 or 6 now, but I finally got started.  Today I decided to work from a Step By Step Animals (acrylic) tutorial book that I have. It's supposed to be realistic, but I think I ended up with something a little more impressionistic. Here's the first step:




Here is the latest version.. I'm probably done with it:



Earlier today, I did another painting but I need to let it sit for a bit and see if I want to do more with it. I won't show it right now.  It was an experiment in my Rte 101 Bowie to Sunset (with possible side trips) project.

 I don't know if I'll enter the earlier painting in the 10 day challenge as I'd like the challenge to be a sort of "learn to paint" thing for me, or rather a way to get a better idea of what I'm doing and see what direction I'd like to go.

I'm not sure what style is "me" yet and don't know if I want to go back to my old abstract style from the early 80s... I'm drawn to folk art/whimsy, as well as a lot of other styles, mostly expression-representative.. the horse portrait above was meant to be realistic, but it was not the first project in the book, so maybe I wasn't building up skills. The reason I picked that one to paint is because the picture I did earlier has a horse in it & the horse doesn't look very good, looks like an afterthought.  One of the other problems with this morning's picture is it has a lot of foreground... just need to think about it a little bit! I may just need to do it over differently.