Battle of the Canvases

I tried to paint this afternoon, but it didn’t go so well.  I had initially started with kind of an abstract color work.  I was excited to give this one a try since I bought a couple mediums to play around with……epic failure.  First off, it got warmer and a bit breezy so the paint dried quicker than I wanted.  Okay, not life ending since I’ve been working on painting quickly and not reworking areas over and over.  It’s funny, I paint pretty loose, but I am a fairly stringent perfectionist.  Anyhow, so I was engaged in the Battle of Fast Drying Paint, which I can now admit that I lost.  Big time.  But, during the heat of battle, my one woman SEAL team was not going to give up.  So, I pressed on which was the second issue.  Of all people, I should know better than to keep going on something when my emotions are not in check.  Yeah, I got emotional over the silly little painting and of course my work quality went down.  After at least an hour of patiently layering colors, punching up the darks and lights, and a bunch of other technical things, I did what I should have done long before.  Yeah, I put the brush in the water and sat back.  So the first painting went promptly into the art bin (once dry) and I will figure out what to do another day.  Canvas No. 1 gets the win, Steph takes a loss.

So, now Canvas No. 2 comes out and I take a deep breath and get my head on straight.  I had started the background colors a while back, so it was ready to be worked on.  I started laying down the color for the sky…..and the paint was drying almost as soon as it came off the brush.  I suppose this is one of the fun aspects of painting outdoors.  I should add that it is now mid-afternoon and the breeze is pretty steady and we are heading into the warmest part of the day.  At this point, I just want to have something done since the first canvas just…..yeah….it can stay in the art bin for a bit.  So, I keep working on the sky, but faster. I should note that blending colors like I do is really difficult (if not impossible) when your paint dries super quick.  I finally put the clouds in and outlined the landscape, and called it quits.  I learned my lesson.  Canvas No. 2 didn’t beat me, but I guess I did concede the afternoon.

Hopefully, the weather will cooperate and I’ll be able to get back outside soon and finish.