My Creative Journey 23 + Watch me Paint! Ep. 010

Every journey begins with a step...and continues with countless more. There is no end to the creative path. Only progress. To get better you have to do. Your skills, your mind, your art will not get better unless you try. And trying means you will fail a lot. But, if you keep at it, eventually you will triumph, break through, and be where you want to be. Here is another step on my journey.

Ugh, gotta be honest, my head is dying from this part time job. Don't get me wrong, money is nice, and I'm not gonna complain about it, but man does it make it hard to get back into the creative mindset I need to do what I need to do. Though, this experience is strengthening mental muscles and discipline I never knew I had. Evolve, adapt, never break.

So, on to art and stuff :)

This was the first painting of the evening. I still had a craving to work on skulls, and try the black, blue, gray, yellow and white color combo since I messed it up quite hard on my last painting of yesterday. I like that color combo, and trust me, you're gonna see more of it. Though, maybe not for the next several days as I got a gut feeling to do some more ink stuff for a minute, and I got some freelance retouching work I gotta handle in the evening too. These multi-color paintings can take a long time.

I'm trying hard to keep with the bold strength of colors and lines I had with my black on brown paintings that I started with.

I like the energy it conveys, even if the images themselves are still pretty weak. And, the only way to get better is to keep at it. Though, I'm gonna need to make more money to pay for more art supplies, lol. Never knew this kind of hunger before, even with photography. Like breathing...I just gotta do it. The plans I got in my head for the coming six months to make this shit really real for me, and hopefully to start making a living off of it...got a decade of experience, knowledge, and skills about to come to bear, muahahah.

Overall I was ok with this one. The far side of the skull, meaning the other eye-hole, really sucks. The lines get really confused, and there's some extra stuff there. But, I did better with the color combo. How I mix them together is still confusing, but, I'm not worried. That will take time. The confidence to fuck up is what I'm building up, and the pleasure of just trying stuff.

My next piece is one where I just decided to run with what was on my mind...lots of demons still lurking... :)

I will say that I had a blast painting this one. Setting aside my brushes for a minute I got back to basics. I wish I had used both hands for this one, to get a bit more symmetry, but, in many ways I really love the asymmetry of the piece. How, in some ways, it almost feels like two different faces. I can't tell you how much I love that visceral feeling of the paint on my fingers...but, it's a lot. When I make enough to do oil paints...well, let's just say I'm really excited about that. I know I'm jumping the gun on a lot of different stuff, and I should be patient and build up to stuff like that, but, seriously, fuck it. I did that with photography and it got me nowhere. So, as I've been preaching, follow that gut.

One of the cool things of dashing head long into all of this is to see the evolution on an accelerated scale.

I've paged through some of my older paintings recently and...wow. Some stuff hasn't changed, but a lot has. Growth...it's an awesome feeling. Now, I just need to capitalize on it, hehe.

As to why I wrote Me, and Sleep on this. Well, I'm hella tired right now. I sleep on my lunch breaks because it's the only time during the day where I don't have anything I need to be doing. Well, there's a lot I could be doing in that 30 minutes...but a minds gotta rest sometime and my dreams are just as active as my days lately.

With my third painting I went back to straight color...and out came something rather unexpected, lol.

Apparently my friend Karl now inhabits my subconscious because this painting really looks like him. I think that means I really need to open up to more experiences and get some more inspiration, hehe. It's hard though, when most of your day is spent working, followed by creating, with the weekends like a marathon of catching up...so, I know I'm going to have to work on my time management skills. Gone are the days (for now) of doing what I wanted and needed to do when I wanted to do it. Thus is life. Adapt or die :)

You'll notice the same color scheme.

I love the comic feel of it and need to work on my strokes and do some studying so that I get better control of how I put the paint on the paper. It looks so easy, but, trust me, right now, every time I make a stroke my mind has to be focused on it or it comes out wrong. I'm nowhere near just brushing out what's in my head, or what my subconscious wants to get out. Every day a thousand lessons, hehe.

I figured out how to grab a video last night. And I say figured out because I was trying a new way of painting...on my wall. I wanted to see how it felt, if it was any different, if it would change how my paintings looked...and, I don't think it really did. What it did do is give my damn calves a workout. Standing on a bed bouncing around for 4 hours painting is a hell of a workout, let me tell you. Walking up to a sore body was quite unexpected, hehe.

So, here's EP. 10 of Watch me Paint! Hope you enjoy.

Music: Lobo Loco