Flourishing the brush, and so on.

Today was yet another rainy day. Because of this, Rebecca and I spent several hours painting in the kitchen. We painted to a variety of songs, mostly chosen by Rebecca, whose content greatly affected the mood of my painting. Mostly it was the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack with a little bit of Shakira.

 

Unfortunately, the sketch I had been planning to paint today was of the ocean and the sky, and it just so happened that I left my blue paint at home, which was rather silly of me. Of course I would leave a primary color, and not my green or yellow ochre or brown.

Look at my sad paints. They miss their blue buddy. Next time Granny and I go into Inverness, we will find a new blue tube to join them, and then hopefully I can get down to business. I really like using acrylics. First off, they're incredibly easy to control compared to watercolor. I tend to get watercolor all over the place, especially in the places I don't want it to go, like on my clothes. It also gets the paper all soggy which makes my spirits soggy. Another fun thing about acrylic is that you can create all sorts of dimension by glopping* as much paint on as you like and then sculpting it into ridges and swirls and whatnot. These particular paints are Winsor & Newton Galeria acrylics. This is a bonus, because that is a really classy brand name. People will look at that and automatically know that my skills are akin to those of Van Gogh, Monet, Degas, and all the greats.

I decided to go with a rather colorful picture of the Cromarty lighthouse. Here is my sketch.

Here is Rebecca, using a palette of watercolors to create her abstract opus, a splendid work which I entitled Ambiguous Body Part 1. I anticipate a whole series of paintings which will most likely elicit monumental advances in the art world at large. Her stroke technique in conjunction with her original color choices and daring use of the brush bristles as part of the piece begs the question: what will she do next?

Here is my painting. It is still incomplete, as my creative cogs were disrupted by a tempting game of Bananagrams. I wasn't quite sure what I was doing with the sky, but it turns out to be a rather stormy night, I think. I will finish it tomorrow. I might work on the sky some more first, just to make it a little darker. My real predicament is that I can't decide if I want to make the lighthouse pure white or more of an off white, and I don't know whether I'll do much shadowing. Honestly, I don't have much idea of what I'm doing, I mostly just like playing around. I figure just because you aren't good at something, that doesn't mean you shouldn't keep doing it, especially if it makes you happy!

*Glopping /glapiŋ/ verb; present participle of Glop (a) to concentrate a gummy, amorphous substance into a protruding mass; (b) a rapid movement, similar to galloping, which one often does when one wants to get quickly to another location and doesn't mind looking rather silly.