My Recent Work

I went shopping about two days ago and along with a variety of new clothes, I also bought new art supplies. I honestly only planned on getting some more paper and white acrylic paint but I ended up buying a lot more. The big thing was these three little tubes of blue, red, and yellow oil paint.

I started to paint more again. About a week ago I did this still life with acrylic paint.

I didn't think anything of it when I started, but as I started to get into the candle holder thing I realized that I knew more about painting then I had before. I saw myself doing shading in places that I'd never do before when I painted more, and even color was pretty easy to use, which was the biggest surprise because even with my oil paint I didn't have any color. I think that this piece is far from perfect, but it had been twenty three days exactly since the last time I picked up a paint brush and for that time I consider this a huge success.

Two days after this piece was made, I painted a self portrait. 

I wanted to get more used to using a mirror rather than a picture because I want to be able to draw people in real life rather than from a picture. I don't like this one too much, and it was also made with acrylic paint, but I'm showing it because it is part of four self portraits from a mirror that I want to talk about. His skin is that color because when I opened my blinds for some more light, I looked like this weird purple. 

I already said that I didn't like the previous painting, but when I compare it to the last self portrait painting I had done, I much rather prefer the newer one.

After I went shopping I also bought new watercolors, so on that day I decided that I didn't want to have to deal with a big clean up, so I painted with the watercolors. This is a medium that I have almost no experience in, and I had serious difficultly making this piece, but for the amount of trouble that I had, I am ultimately proud of the result. 

All of this lead up to what I made yesterday in about an hour and what I finished this morning in another half hour. 

I don't know what happened, but I felt really comfortable working on this piece. I have touched oil paints in almost a month, which is a long time considering that I've only been painting for about four months, and I cranked this out like it was nothing. The colors are something that came out of a different weird light that came from my window, and I had chosen to make it a little more radical.

All in all, I'm super proud of the final piece, and I feel that all that time I spent with charcoal got me better with shading.