Progress!

I've been working diligently on this painting and I feel like it's getting close to finished. I'm really enjoying the way I'm applying/scraping/destroying the paint and I want this history to show in the final product. I'm finding that what's tricky about this process is that I need a good balance of refinement and looseness or the painting starts to look like crap. Ultimately, I need to refine a few things and then screw up other things and I think the painting will be finished. At least that's what I hope.

Progress and Looseness

I have been feeling the itch to loosen up for a couple of months. My work is not usually as tight as it has been, but I felt the need to push myself in a more realistic direction. I'm having a lot of fun now that I've loosened up and I feel like I should have been painting this way all along. The difficult thing I'm experiencing now is how to know when my paintings are done. I don't feel like either of these are finished yet, so I'll probably paint until I get sick of them and then call them finished.

 I had some more compositional issues with this piece. Here is the block-in before I was going to build the smaller canvas. At this stage I still wasn't happy with the composition so I made everything a little bigger.

Here is the result (with a bit of work added) but I am finally content with the composition. The previous iteration didn't have the impact or power I wanted to convey, but I found that making everything fill out the canvas more did the trick. It also meant that I didn't have to build another canvas, which is a win all the way around.

 I put this guy on the back-burner for a while. This is what it looks like 3 sittings after it's first post. I worked on it a couple of months ago when I was trying to get it ready for my solo show but (luckily) wasn't able to finish it. The painting at that stage - which I unfortunately didn't document - was really stiff and didn't have the energy that was so nice in the early stage of the piece, so yesterday I pulled it out again and got wild with it. Now I'm starting to have fun with it again.

Painting Process

Hey guys and gals. I'm currently working on a painting of my kitchen and I'm posting my process of the piece. I only work like this on larger paintings (about 30 x 40" and larger) that require a lot of planning and preparation. A few weeks ago I posted the initial line drawing I created after studying the subject for a few weeks. I scanned in the large drawing, printed it out at approx. 4" x 6" and began the value study. Just like the drawings, the value study was done from life. I then scanned in the value study and tweaked the composition until I felt it was correct; aside from cropping the image, I had to reduce the size of the ceiling to get the desired effect of the composition.

I forgot to record the step where I gridded the final composition and transfered it to the final canvas, though you can still see parts of the drawing that have yet to be painted over. I used vine charcoal to transfer the drawing because it doesn't mix with the paint and flakes off easily when paint touches it. Once this step is done, I start painting. Lately the weather hasn't been cooperating so I've only been able to paint for about an hour before I've had to stop (this is one of the issues of working from life and with a fleeting effect of light). The final painting is 36" x 45" and this is what I have after the first 4 sittings.