This past week has been unfortunately exciting for me. I was involved in a minor car accident on Tuesday that was not very good for reducing my stress and anxiety levels. Thankfully, there were no injuries, and my car still runs fine but it still makes me a little anxious when I drive now. Happened at a stop light, too. One of the cars behind suddenly accelerated from a complete stop and rammed into the car behind me. Nothing that could have been prevented, but it still makes me nervous whenever a car pulls up behind me at a stop light now. I’ll get over it.
As for painting, I started reworking “Moonlit Magic” and had a great plan that immediately ended up getting tossed aside. Basically, then plan was to print out the new rework at scale and then transfer the proposed corrections via white pastel but because the canvas was already layered in paint there was nothing for the marks to cling to and they just fell away. So now I’m free handing it with the scaled print out taped up next to my easel to quick reference. Not ideal but doable.
How I’m working it now is I chose a starting point and am correcting in relation to that spot. Since the (viewer) left shoulder was the least altered that was the starting point for repaint. I tried to maintain the overall pose, much as I see changes that could be made, in order to not cause after-shadows on the canvas that I’ve previously run into. I have a painting that I’d started years ago when I was still learning, when I went back and finished it, I completely changed the pose on one arm and when viewed from an angle you can still see the original pose. Much as I love how the painting looks now, I’ll always be a little disappointed by what my own inexperience caused. So, I leave it hanging as a reminder of what I learned not to do.
Since I started that painting, my style has shifted more to flat layers rather than highly textured strokes which helps when I feel the need to make drastic changes, but oil paint has a habit of piling up when I’m trying to make clear edges that end up outlining things quite obviously.
Well, that’s the update for this week. I’ve made decent progress on the repaint but as far as battling my demons (imps, really), there have been some setbacks.