Painting 123 - 8/31

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Oil on gessoboard

8"x10"

There are so many things about this that add up to me cringing in humiliation at the mere sight of it. The drawing is awful - the lips and the eyes are the only things that even sort of work, and even then the eyes' placement is wrong - and... I'll admit, I color-corrected the hell out of the scan (which I tried not to do for these posts) because the original was so awful.

It's better than the first one, but... not by a huge margin.

This is less the capstone of the project and more a testament to how done I was. After this painting, I didn't touch a brush to another surface for almost two weeks the first two days of which I spent watching the most mindless drek I could find streaming on the internet. Therein lies a lot of why it's taken me so long to finish posting these things: I didn't want to look at them, let alone put effort into showing them to others.

But I finished it. For four months, I didn't miss a single day (or night) of painting, come vacation and social visits and hurricanes and apathy and fatigue.

As ashamed of this painting as I am, I'm damn proud of that.

(i'll be doing a postmortem on the project in a day or two)

Painting 122 - 8/30

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8"x8"

This was supposed to be a lemon. Not so much.

Painting 121 - 8/29

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8"x10"

Another not-actually-humiliating meh painting. This was after I got home to my beloved paint kit - and let me just take a moment to say, oh god I am never leaving my brushes ever again.

Painting 120 - 8/28

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8"x10"

Though I'm still throwing it into my 'how can art? week' tag, I'm actually not that embarrassed by this one. It's still shoddy, but part of this lerning2paint thing wound up being a raising of the average.

Painting 119 - 8/27

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8"x8"

My earring, which is a fish, painted after eight hours of moving students into the dorms in the rain. I can't even tell you how desperately I missed my paint kit.

Painting 118 - 8/26

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8"x8"

You guys might remember that there was something of a hurricane that sideswiped New York City in late August. Well, that was the weekend freshmen moved into the dorms at SVA - and being an Orientation Leader, I couch surfed from Friday until Monday, when the trains started running again.

Upshot: I forgot my painting kit at home, and between everyone I stayed with, all I was actually able to scrape up was a tube of Ultramarine Blue, a tube of Titanium White, and a few bad brushes.

Still, I got the paintings done.

Painting 117 - 8/25

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Oil on gessoboard

8"x8"

You know what? I think this painting is more a sign of a success than my final self portrait turned out to be. It's not a masterpiece or groundbreaking, true. In fact, this painting took half an hour, tops. But look: it reads, it has dimensionality, there is a sense of light. In short, it is a successful painting.

That's what this project was about. It was about learning how to use paint, how to manipulate it comfortably, how to stop struggling against the medium.

And you know what? I think I did it.

Painting 116 - 8/24

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Oil on gessoboard

8"x8"

I have nothing much to say about this apart from a general 'yay'. The shadow's not really dimensional enough, and the light isn't really light enough, but I like the yellows. Ho hum!

Painting 115 - 8/23

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8"x8"

This one is pretty thoroughly meh. The handling of the yellow is not much more than okay; I certainty don't have much of a value structure up. At least the cast shadow is good...?

Painting 114 - 8/22

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Oil on gessoboard

8"x8"

As per Tristan Elwell's orders, I have painted a lemon. It... wasn't as difficult as I feared! I wish I'd gotten the shadows a little more chromatic/less muddy, but I'm very, very happy with the yellows. It's something to keep working on, of course, but - yay!

Painting 113 - 8/21

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8"x10"

My tiger cup makes its second appearance, three months after the first.

The first one had a strong, direct light on it, which resulted in some interesting reflections; the seond was painted in natural light. Though I do miss those reflections and the quality of the light, in the three months I learned how to apply paint to a surface better. Also: yellow. Learning to work with yellow!

Painting 112 - 8/20

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8"x10"

Working with green is always hard, but this time it worked better than most. The angle of the razor head even worked out! Woah.

Painting 111 - 8/19

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8"x8"

This fragment-of-a-bowl comes from China! It is a little more chromatic than this, though not by much. I do wish I could get consistently more contrast in my values...