Today has been a crazily productive day! I blame the materials, they were so easy to handle. I had this feeling that I knew how to use paints, but everytime I was using paints in real life, my sense of how the materials should behave, clashed with the actual materials. As the years went by, I attributed it to insufficient skills and probably too much time painting digitally. Today I was gifted an amateurish kit of watercolors; paints,brushes, palette and sketchbook included and was blown away by how it was performing. It was as if there was a direct link between how I wanted to paint, and what the paint would perform! I started with a tinly blockish landscape, then did a spaceship and finally and cat driving and a phage-vehicle! Today was rich in positive things: The performance of the materials is one, the fact that I had probably the greatest fun painting in ages (perhaps 20 years?) and more things, equally important that I'll have to start a new paragraph to describe!
I think the third great thing was that I wasn't expecting anything. I don't think I've started a painting in decades with so little expectations and at the same time so much freedom (actually when I have little expectations, it's because I have few means). I mean, I was expecting these pieces to be a failure, bordering throwaway pieces (after all the materials were supposed to be crap). And through this despair, all the performance anxiety went away; these weren't instagram pieces, these weren't pieces that would ever be sold, these weren't even fine art pieces; I was just playing around, connecting to my most childish!
And woah! Childishness pays off! Another important success of the day was that both the 2nd and 3rd piece, came to my mind as images before I started painting them. And I decided to block out the forms; I chose simple forms for that. This approach really worked out perfectly! What else do I like? I like that I did the silliest, most shameful thing ever, to create a starfield with my brush (which for some reason I'm usually to ashamed to do). I also worked on mixed concave/convex surfaces (the turbines of the spaceship) and tried to do shile! I like the perspective too! Whereas in the last piece, I almost love everything; the cat, the limbs of the vehicle, the general design, the starfield (again!) the dynamic lines in the mountainous masses, the blockish clouds, the rock piles! It's all great! This is probably my finest non-digital illustration! Time for much earned rest; I feel spent!
I may have to switch gouache/watercolor material brand; Perhaps Talens/Van Gogh is really crappy, and this amateurish kit is how real watercolors should perform! That would be a crazy twist!
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