30 in 30 painting challenge begins

1st painting in the 30 in 30 January 2015 challenge

I have committed myself to a 30 paintings in 30 days challenge run by Leslie Saeta. Over 1000 artists have signed up to paint every day and upload their work daily to her blog.  It’s quite neat to see all the variety of work.  Here’s Day 1 postings if you’d like to check it out.

I was excited and confident about this until it got closer to January 1st, and then I wondered, what in the world did I get myself in for?  It all of a sudden sounded like a jail sentence, who did I think I was?  what did I get myself into? I *should* be committed….

But in reality, the challenge is not to produce masterpieces every day, but it’s a way to jumpstart my practice, and incentive to get the brushes wet every day working on something, whether it’s a technique, more work on a painting, playing around, etc.

The playing around I think is the key.  I’m working on ways to psych myself to not take it seriously but look at it as a chance to grow, even if I don’t upload 30 photos in that time.  So you may see parts of a painting, or maybe sketching with watercolor washes, but I will paint every day.

Since I’ve last posted I’ve worked on various attempts at an ornament and I don’t like any of them better than Ornament #1, so I didn’t post them.  And now I’m frankly sick of trying this, so I”ll have to be moving on. but here’s one of yesterday’s tries.

So what did I learn?  I’ve learned I don’t mix enough of a puddle on my palette so i’m stopping to mix a new batch while the already painted area dries and then the color isn’t fluid on the paper.  And I don’t have a clear idea of the pine needles so it’s hard to negatively paint them, especially with no drawing on the paper ahead of time.

Negative painting is putting down the lightest color (i.e. the light glinting off the needles) and then painting around that to create the other needles or background foliage.  It’s a hard concept for me to wrap my head around especially without a clear understanding of the structure, based on sketching.  So I think one of my jobs for this month is to sketch pine boughs and needles, transfer it to paper and then try the negative painting.  Or let that go and work on a myriad of other projects…  we shall see!  My blog should be busy this month, so I hope you’ll come along for the ride and see what happens!