Monday, May 4, 2009

Partly Cloudy

Partly Cloudy
8"x 10"
Oil on Canvas Board
Click here to purchase.

Hee-hee! I love working small. I started this painting this morning and finished about an hour ago. Talk about instant gratification! Um... well, its more instant than spending weeks on the same painting.

Two paintings ago my husband pointed at the reference photo for this painting and said "Why don't you do that one next." First thing I thought was Ick! A horizontal! I've been on a bit of a vertical kick. You may have noticed.

I sketched the clouds a couple of times and something about it just didn't feel right- until this morning.

Last night I hung the picture on my handy dandy little reference photo holder that is attached to my easel, and set a "blank" red primed canvas in place, ready to go. This morning I sketched it all out again in my little Moleskine to work on the composition, and this time I felt good about my little blue print- except it wasn't blue, it was gray and paper colored....

I also didn't scrape my pallette from the last painting like I usually do. A lot of the colors were, if not the same, very close so I could alter them easily. Having most of the colors already mixed helped. Its that whole P.A. (Plan Ahead) thing again. That has been one of the greatest lessons of my adult life so far- thank you Brad.

Remember how I was fussing a couple of posts ago about how hard painting was and I was ready for it to come easily again? Partly Cloudy basically painted itself. It was wonderful!

I made a mental shift in my personal life and was rewarded all around. Awesome. Once I realized what the problem really was, my shift came quickly and easily. Would you call it submission... release... ? Whatever the word is, it was good. It was like a great big Ahhhhh and the creativity flowed like peanut butter. Um... warm peanut butter (smooth, not chunky).

And now I have another horizontal painting under my belt- Dun-Dun-DUN!

It has been a good day.

3 comments:

Kerri Settle said...

It's wonderful! I'm guilty of reusing the paint left on my palette for following paintings and often purposely pick a reference with a similar color scheme to the first to take advantage of it. I don't know if it's laziness or thriftiness but it works!

L.Holm said...

Zowie, Sara!!! Fantabulous :-) Whatever surrender or shift you achieved, it sure worked! This is beautiful. Wish you could bottle that whatever it is and send some my way. lol. Well done!

Sharlette White said...

Beautiful, you can feel the distance from the background to the foreground. I love it. I have been looking at a lot of sky paintings since you started these and I love the depth you can almost feel in some of them.