My 14^th gouache is a Bohemian waxwing — I was quite taken by the incredibly vivid reds and yellows in the wings and tail, they were fun. 8 x 10, watercolour paper mounted on cardboard: a surface I found in Dollar Tree and have since stocked up on. I find it a very handy work surface for gouache.



My 63^rd acrylic is a seasonal Golden Lab. Got organic greens by mixing yellow and black: a trick I picked up a while back and still get a kick out of. 10 x 10, canvas.

 scoring a humongous bargoon on canvases

My 61^st acrylic is another in my projected No Idea series.

( the 'story' behind it )

My 59^th acrylic is another in my projected No Idea series.

( the story behind it )

I am calling this my eleventh gouache painting, even though technically that isn't correct: this was done on a 4-by-6 canvas board and all my other gouaches were on paper, and the paint calls itself acrylic paint rather than gouache. Bear with me while I explain:






This was my first time trying Deco Earth brand “reclaimed acrylic” paint — claims to be more opaque and more matte finish than regular acrylic. The opaque is maybe a bit true, but the matte finish is way true. It's a lot like working with acrylic gouache IMHO — hence my labelling it such. Handles nice and I look forward to working with it again. (Even though the range of pigments available to work with leaves a little to be desired, I think.) 

My 52^nd and 53^rd acrylics are, as you can see, both pups. One is a gift, one is for putting up at the cafe and [hopefully] selling. I've already realized that my animal paintings are the closest I get to “crowd-pleasers”. So, when it comes time to make a gift, that's what I fall back on. But I've also already begun to wonder how much these paintings actually qualify as fine art. Like, do they say anything? Do they express anything about me? Maybe they're just an expression of “my love of animals”, and maybe that's enough, I dunno....

On the other hand, I can think of an artist I see on Instagram who only ever paints horses, and she quite cheerfully admits that's all she ever has any intention of painting, because that's what she loves most. And I've never questioned her legitimacy as An Artist®, so why do I need to question my own?

On the third hand, lately I've gotten more of an urge to spend at least some of my easel time working on less accessible pieces — I can feel things in me wanting to get out. I've already resigned myself to those new pieces not being understood or enjoyed, but I still feel like they'll be worth trying anyway.

Getting back into The Painting Groove®.

It's been weeks [months?] since I painted, largely due to adverse health circumstances, but also lack of ideas-slash-inspiration. But the deadline of Christmas looming has been making me fret, and I owe some people paintings as gifts, so I finally panicked enough to force myself once more into the breach.

I've noticed that, whenever I'm away from painting for a while, I eventually get to feeling like I have forgotten how. I lose what little confidence I've developed, and start to believe that whatever I produce now won't be any good. [Something similar happens with cartooning, but that feels more like gotten rusty than don't remember how.] But, in the last couple of days, I have finished the gifts that absolutely had to be done, and once I got about a third of the way into each one, I realized that they were turning out Okay Enough®, and I started feeling like I have a clue again.

I realize that the solution is “don't go so long without arting”, but this is me we're talking about here, so....

Over the past five years, I have read a lot of books, articles, posts, etc. about "how to paint". Most of them offer advice along the lines of things you should or shouldn't do. Rules, or at least rules of thumb.

In that same period, I have seen each one of those rules broken [successfully] by at least one artist producing a good piece in their own lawless fashion. Sometimes that artist has even been me!

Selling a painting: someone bought the Sheltie a couple days ago. Making a sale is still such a novelty for me that it feels like a big deal. [To be fair, I always felt that that painting had the most curb appeal of any of mine, so I always expected it to be the one that would go.]

My 45^th acrylic is a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. [I'm showing it after #46 cuz this one was a gift and I waited til it was received before making it public.] I find myself wondering if I should've made the green background lighter so that the dog's head would stand out more distinctly. But I also realize that I like how the dog's brown and the background green are similar in value, to create fewer, larger and simpler shapes of light and dark values, to make a stronger composition. I am unusually aware this time of the distinction between how the work functions as composition vs. as depiction.

[It also made me realize how often I make decisions like this in cartooning, composition vs. depiction, and I realize that, in that medium, clarity of depiction is always most important. Sometimes we downplay conventional rules of composition to make the image communicate with more clarity and immediacy.]