Monday, February 11, 2013

Art and Painting after 30 in 30

The "30 Paintings in 30 Days" Challenge is over and I have to admit that I felt a little lost after it was all over.   The crash after being on such a high for a month?!..:-)  I was looking forward to working on larger work, which now just seems more difficult, because there's not that immediate sense of accomplishment I feel when I can finish something in a day.  

One thing that helped was having Leslie Saeta come and demo at my local Art Guild on the Tuesday after the end of the challenge.  I asked her about a year ago and continued to bug her...so I was so glad that she was able to fit it into her more than busy schedule.   What an amazing treat!   It was so great to hear Leslie share her her personal successes and funny stories as she was mixing and painting away.   We were all intrigued by the palette knife painting, motivated to take chances with marketing our art, and inspired by her experiences and accomplishments.
In the week since I have done some painting, but nothing that I've posted so far and I've been catching up on life and spending some time with the kids!
This is one little painting I've been working on, but haven't finished as of yet.
 I love the color combination, but it's a lot of color?!!:-) and I might need to tone it down in some areas to enhance the focal point.
Got to see Ignat Ignatov paint Rich Brimer's portrait at the Kwan Fong Gallery at Cal Lutheran last Monday as well.
He's so talented, and it was interesting to see his process and how he starts out really loose to be able to stay that way.  First thing he did was an underpainting that captures the intense back lighting he uses on his model and then he works on adding the features and refining everything with these great whispy brush strokes intertwining different colors still keeping the looseness he started with.
See the finished portrait here