I’ve just had a bit of a bad few days with one painting. It was going well, blending skills I have recently learnt with older ones and trying out some new ideas. I have learnt to add visual complexity and detail using a palette knife. That is particularly useful because of my tendency to shake and twitch (see the sudden bend in the rail line).
That close-up also shows that I have not always learnt to overcome the difficulties of sequencing in painting, with the rail line going over some of the foreground vegetation.
The rail lines and other similar details are another problem for me and the shakes, as I seem to get worse if I try to measure and use a ruler. I’ve learnt ways of relaxing before trying to make marks to reduce the shake and I’ve realised that we only really notice detail in particular situations, such as those rail lines and even then they don’t stand out in larger numbers
I was experimenting with various things to overcome some of these difficulties and have been trying acrylic pens, which seem to work except that they are a bit inconsistent for me. This is where another persistent problem came into play – failure to concentrate. In that close-up above there are crows and pylons (I love Pylons and wires). I didn’t have a black acrylic pen, so grabbed the finest black marker I could find and it worked, until later when I over hastily put a layer of matte varnish on. Without me noticing at first, the varnish simply smeared and wiped out all that detail I had put on. Arrgh.
This is where that other skill that age has taught me comes in – patience. Instead of having a minor tantrum and tearing it all up, I bought some acrylic ink and tried some experiments (on a spare piece of paper this time) using my ancient dip pen. I hated dip pens when we used them at school but this seems to have worked reasonably well. I even went as far as to add some gulls in white.
Even so I then reverted to type when it came to sticking the picture on to a cradled board support. For all my my measuring and marking, I manage to stick it down upside down and slightly skewed. Time for a break and some of that patience and persistence. Using my newly learned skills with palette knives and scrapers, I came back and carefully manged to remove it from the board with only two minor tears. Here is the corrected result.
Of course these messages also apply to everything you do. Even after several years of chair making my brain would go AWOL but there are always remedies. This is a detail from my last chair showing that I had to take it apart, fill in the hole in the wrong place and drill it in the right place. That is still probably the chair that most captures my style, warts and all.
Have fun and keep at it.
