Painting 1 - Tree Swallow

After hearing me whine about being frustrated with my art and where I am with it, Laure from over at Painted Thoughts has challenged me to paint 100 paintings in a year. The idea is to paint these paintings with no judgment, no worrying about whether they are good or bad, just paint one after another. This process of immersion will teach me so much about painting and about myself.

So I am going to take this challenge and do my very best to paint 100 paintings in the next year. That's basically one painting every three days. The clock starts NOW!

I used my lunch break today to start a rough sketch of my first subject; this dapper tree swallow. I think that doing the prep for the painting during my lunch break will save time at home at night and also let me start thinking about the painting and let my brain stew on it for the rest of the work day so that I am eager to paint when I get home.

As is typical of me, I didn't plan ahead very well and I discovered when I set up to paint this evening that I had run out of watercolor paper, so I had to paint on Bristol. Bristol is my preferred choice for pen and ink, but when painting on it, it can only handle so much water before starting to slough off, so I had to be really careful about the amount of water I put down as I painted this.

One thing I noticed immediately as I began painting was that I was rushing. I never used to rush when I did art, but a few years ago I had a job that often ate up 10 or 12 hours of my day, sometimes 6 days a week. When I did have time off I was so exhausted. So I wasn't able to do much art and when I did, I would paint at a feverish pace as I didn't know when the next time I could do art would be. This apparently has turned in to a habit, and one I need to break!

See - already I am learning.