Belated Summer-of-Painting Post Mortem

It's been over a month since my last post; it's been over two months since the end of the project itself. By this point, I'd be shocked if anyone was actually still reading this blog.

Basically, in the last two months, my biggest Quest fear was allayed: that this project was an ambitious but overall useless effort. The illustrations I've done in the last month and a half show a better understanding of color and paint handling and drawing, though I have a long way to go in all three areas yet, and I'm working faster than I was last year.

For those playing along at home, the quote that got me through this summer was, '"What you can, when you can" - to suspend the manic urge to fulfill your potential and instead focus on doing what is possible, with the materials to hand.' That was pretty much what I needed at that moment - a mantra to keep myself focused on the present, day-to-day effort to improve. I was smarting hard from the previous year, where I overreached and overcommitted and failed hard and repeatedly.

I've outgrown that quote now. I can't settle for the possible; it's time to push again. I'm middle of the pack (where 'the pack' is the very small pond of 'the SVA Class of 2012 Illustration Department'). At my best I can break into the lowest ranks of the top - but that's at my very best, and those historically have happened beyond my conscious control. Telling myself to calm down and concentrate on doing what was possible is what enabled me to claw my way through last year's Thesis project and this summer's Quest - but, having survived that, I've realized that I don't have anything to gain by that frame of mind.

Randall Munroe said it perfectly: "You don't become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, and then doing it so hard that you become great in the process."

I want this so badly - 'this' being a career in fantasy illustration. I look at Donato and Dan Dos Santos and Tristan Elwell and Tyler Jacobson and Rebecca Guay and Eric Fortune and Kinuko Craft and John Jude Palencar and I want to be them. I want to wake up every day for the rest of my life and paint.

I won't get there by being middle-of-the-pack, and I won't climb above middle-of-the-pack by taking reasonable steps.

The three newest illustrations I've done, each one completed within the last month and a half, have all been ambitious, and all of them have failed to do everything I wanted of them - but each one has been better by far than anything I did last year. It's been hard, to say the least, and exhausting, and often frustrating, but I'm growing so fast I can feel my bones creak.

I'll let Elizabeth Bear, who is much smarter than me, say it:

"...spectacular failures, big reaches. They're scary. They're also necessary, because it's climb or die, strive or stagnate. If I'm not on the verge of failure all the time, I'm not working hard enough."

"Reach, reach harder, stretch higher, and grasp something a little bit better than if you contented yourself with assured success"

"There's more honor in over-reaching and failing with ambition, than in limited success. And if we measure our goals by the best of the best, at least we're unlikely to run out of challenges."

It's exciting; it's exhilarating. I'm gaining confidence, and I'm getting results. It also makes me a little skittish - it smacks of hubris to that part of my mind that constantly smacks me down - but, to quote Elizabeth Bear yet again:

"The first step to moving the world is picking up the lever. The second step is accepting that you have the strength to put that sucker where you want it. You gotta wanna. But you also have to believe you can."

I'm learning to believe that I can. This weekend, I attended Illuxcon with Joyce Li, Andrew Ryan, Greg Opalinski, and Cristina La Venuta. I showed my portfolio to everyone I could, and it was extremely gratifying to hear the positive feedback. The keyword was 'potential' - I'm not there yet, but I have the seeds of something, and for artists and art directors alike to tell me that made me prouder than I can really express.

This is the year for me to get my ducks in a row. It's my last year of grace before the Real World, and I intend to push for every minute of it.

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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Oil on gessoboard

8"x8"

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

Painting 121 - 8/29

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Oil on gessoboard

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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Oil on gessoboard

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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Oil on gessoboard

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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Oil on gessoboard

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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Oil on gessoboard

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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Oil on gessoboard

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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Oil on gessoboard

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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Oil on gessoboard

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...

Painting 110 - 8/18

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Oil on gessoboard
8"x10"

Because I can't count, here's the eighth installment of my Value Challenge Week. I'm overall happy, even if the handle is a little rubbery-looking.

Painting 109 - 8/17

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Oil on gessoboard
8"x8"

Hahaha, just to spite me, this half-hour painting came out better than some of the ones I was actually putting effort into. It's my tiny Moleskine, which I actually haven't worked in for a while (a friend bought me one of those hardbacked black ones~). The cast shadow perspective is off and not contrasty enough, but apart from that...

Painting 108 - 8/16

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Oil on gessoboard
8"x10"

There's something off on the perspective of this... it's an okay painting, just a leeeetle bit off. I don't think the contrast is high enough, for one thing.

Painting 107 - 8/15

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Oil on gessoboard
8"x10"

This... this one looks better the further you get from it. Up close, it's sloppy and awful and augh. The circles are aaaaalmost right, which is a saving grace or sorts?

Painting 106 - 8/14

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Oil on gessoboard
8"x8"

The converter plug thing for my Macbook charger! Bah, bad perspective on the end thing, but the rest of it's okay? Feh.

Painting 105 - 8/13

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Oil on gessoboard
8"x8"

Despite some initial problems with the shape of the handle, I am very pleased with the result of this painting. Except for that damn line on the far side of the shovel part of the shovel - what was I thinking?