day #365 - the end of an era

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I thought I was on top of it; I had finished early and was looking for a movie to watch already 3 hours ago. And I don't know how time went by. A phonecall, some networking studying, some online shopping and here we are, already past the time for an early movie. Regardless, today is a special day. The blog is over! I finished 365 days of daily painting and recording it, whatever that means. A big part of the process I will have to keep doing mainly for myself. Perhaps taking daily photos of my work and saving it on some folder. This has provem useful many times when I trying to date a piece I've been working on. Also making a small diary of today's achievements. It's still useful. But this will be done for my eyes only. I also don't know if I will be continuing my obsessively daily painting. How would life be if I had days off? Now for example that I'm moving out and I have to daily chores that until now were completely taken care of, perhaps I'll allow my
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day #302 - Fire to the fire!

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Today has been a very pivotal day. Okay, maybe I'm exaggerating, but I somehow broke one pattern. Last day's piece was not the most exciting one, and it left me with feelings of disgust. Today, I decided that I didn't have to lose anything, and that it was the perfect opportunity to relax, and really try "strange" stuff. What I did try, was saturating the paper surface with pastels; I just tried to cover up the paper from showing through, with thick layers of pastel. This is something that with my limited pastel experience I've been avoiding since I've found that there won't be any tooth left to further refine the colors. Plus (and this is a recent realization) some of my pastel colors (Van Gogh) have a very strong waxy compound and as a result, they won't adhere on anything, and won't allow anything to adhere to them. For a start this has been an eyeopener, since this means that a better brand of pastels might give me a much more workable material but secondly, I haven't really tried saturating the paper. So that's what I did today.
Unexpectedly, this has transformed the piece in my eyes! What before was a disguisting piece, now is a somewhat cartooney, yet beautifully colored piece that I can't get enough looking at and I'm looking forward to continue!
I'm not sure I've had such a reframing ever again!To sum up, with this piece I've overcome my initial disgust, I've let go and relaxed with the expectations, I've tried something I was afraid of doing (saturating the paper), I've discovered something about the quality of my pastels brand and I've created a piece that I want to resume working on!
In the evening I started doodling on the ipad and did some lanscapes with successful (I'm feeling I've leveled up) perspective, a very interesting scene of three figures on a strange space-shuttle, a beautiful, curvey spaceship and some heads and hands. I'm not too happy about the heads, so I'd like to make a "reframing" note: These heads while not the best, they've been another honest attempt at getting it right! Yeap, that's true!
I've also found some sort of balance with instagram by posting yesterday's stuff which alows me to sleep earlier by not having to to that in the evening aswell with the added benefit of removing the stress of having to do something instaworthy every day. That's all for now, time for rest.

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