Day 30: "The Revelation"

I made it! 30 days of painting daily!

Here's my LAST painting in the series:

 

This is a tiny one - maybe 6" x 6". I am happy with the looseness and composition. I used a viewfinder which helped quite a bit, and added some of the porcelain shards we discovered in the creek yesterday.  This is the now-baked head of the same fish I painted two days ago. Still worth painting!

Thank you all for joining me. I have learned quite a bit. Let me run through the revelations that hit me over this 30 days.

1. Some days you just feel it

I went into some paintings just knowing they were going to work - and they usually did

2. Bristle brushes work better for me than soft nylon ones do

I like the way they push the paint around. Unfortunately, I didn't get to use any bristle brushes until day 28, when my wife brought me some from the states. They are so much better.

3. Sketching helps

Sketching out locations with a pencil or brush to get the right placement of objects helps a lot. I used to just attack the canvas without much planning - now I've discovered that often leads to blah compositions and awkward moments.

4. You really only need a few colors

Today's painting had four in it. Red, yellow, blue and white.

5. Plein air painting is much tougher than still life

Rain, climbing mountains, fast shifts in the light, trouble with atmospheric perspective... I need to get out with my easel more. This has been a terribly rainy month with rain most days - the rainiest yet - and so I didn't get nearly as much outdoor time as I had hoped. Maybe in the dry season! I'm committed to plein air painting and I need to do a lot more, but I've also decided that I can tell stories with still life, which is a new thing for me.

6. Daily painting has improved me

The last painting I did was much easier than the first. Each day I learned something new or built on a previous discovery. I need to keep doing this for a year!

Maybe I'll do just that.

Day 29: Fail Bridge

Despite threatening skies, I packed up my French easel and started up the road to the top of the mountain with my daughter in search of a vista we could paint.

We finally came to a small bridge and decided to stop and paint, as finding a good clear view was not happening.

A few minutes after we started, the rain came in. Not hard, but just enough to ensure we were in trouble!

This is all I managed to paint:

I ended up crouching and painting with the canvas beneath the work area of my easel so I could keep going but my colors went to mud and my view was poor, so... nothing great to report here. After a while we gave up and packed away everything... and the sky cleared!

My daughter convinced me that we should hunt for artifacts in the river, so we did that for a pleasant couple of hours in two different places. Beneath the bridge above, and further down on a friend's farm. We found an abundance of pottery and porcelain shards, plus old glass. I also found a clay Amerindian artifact of unknown use. I'll take pictures at some point - I'm dying to know what it is.

Overall, a great day... for everything but painting!

Day 28: Fish for Dinner

This already scaled, gutted and slit tuna provided an interesting subject:

 

This one I could feel was going to work as I painted it. The panel is larger - maybe a 13 x 13, too. I used a bristle brush for a lot of the work and was quite happy with the more aggressive paint application compared to the nylon brushes I had been using. 

Day 27: Coconuts

This little painting was done on an irregular piece of wood from a broken chair:

Not bad, but I think the eyes in the top coconut need to be readjusted for spacing.

Day 25 & 26: Failed Experiments

On day 25 I painted a very boring painting:

Then on day 26 I tried an experiment with gridding a photo, then transferring it to the panel but gave up on it.

I wouldn't even post these two here if I could help it, as neither shows well or feels finished. Thrift store art, right?

Day 24: Girl (Underpainting)

I decided to try my hand at a small portrait for day 24.

This is the underpainting in black and white - all I managed to finish. Pretty close likeness.

Day 23: Bat House