Checking in. 2023.

Long time no see! 

I'll be turning 32 soon, and whilst life is in a comfortable place right now, I know that I've been on cruise-control for the past few years, which is totally fine, but I feel that there's something missing.

Still working on kicking my screen-time habit, I'll get home from work, greet the cats, and plonk myself down at the computer almost as soon as I get back. Weekends are similar, unless I'm out on the bike or trying something new.

On the art front, it's been a mixed bag.

For starters, I totally lost the daily practice habit- I started a new job last year at around the time of my previous post, and whilst the hours are very comfortable, I found that a lot of my focus was split between impressing the new school, producing new lesson plans every week (first time that I've had to do that in a few years), and getting deeper into other hobbies (photography, drones), as well as my gaming habit coming back in full force.

That being said, I did have some successes over the summer, producing two paintings for a friend's art exhibition. 

The first painting took around ten hours to 'complete', and whilst I would have liked to have added more to the piece, I felt that I needed to give it a break in order to continue on and start a second painting.

'Nancy', Acrylic on Paper, 2023.

 

Overall I’m fairly happy with how this first painting turned out- I wanted to experiment with a looser and more expressive style (at least compared with things that I’ve done before), and I quite like the colour harmony in particular. In the future I’d like to look at getting even looser and playful with my brushwork, and give myself the time to go back and refine details that I wasn’t as happy with.

 

As for this painting, ‘Night Market’ was my first attempt at working with oil paints, and whilst I’m aware of oil being quite a slow medium to work in, I should’ve respected this more, as I had to rush to finish this piece in time, and on the day of submission, the paint was still totally wet! I had to box up the painting and very carefully transport it to the gallery, and even when hanging the piece, we managed to get paint on our hands anyway.

'Night Market', Oil on canvas, 2023.

Oil paints were quite fun in the end, I particularly enjoyed applying thicker impasto strokes with the palette knife, though I didn’t quite grasp how best to approach painting in faces, features and details- it’s something that I feel will require much more experimentation before it becomes a medium that I’m comfortable with.

 That'll be all for today, the blogger interface is crapping itself and I've run out of patience!

Until next time.