Chocolate Chip Scissor Lips
I officially call this piece “Chocolate Chip Scissor Lips”. Haha – just kidding! 🙂 As I’m sure you can tell, I was just messing around painting various objects that happened to be in front of me.
I decided tonight that maybe I’m trying to do too much too fast. Perhaps it is time to slow down a bit and really get a handle on how to control the paint before I try to do more complex pieces like portraits or floral arrangements.
It’s almost like watercolors move too fast for me. I think I am used to the much slower pace of mosaics, where there is plenty of time to think about your next move. With watercolors, I feel like the paint kind of has a mind of its own….particularly when I have a lot of area to cover. As soon as I wet the paper I get a little bit panicked because I have to work so quickly to get the color laid down before everything dries out. As a result, I wind up rushing through the piece and making a mess of things.
I need to retrain my brain to think about details and to work more slowly. To that end, I spent the evening painting simple objects. I wanted to focus on several factors. First, I wanted to practice painting what I really see instead of what I think I see. I tend to get in a hurry and lose sight of what my eyes are actually seeing. As a result, I fall back into old drawing and shading habits that lack depth and realism.
I also wanted to focus on figuring out how to layer the paint to achieve nicely blended effects that aren’t muddy and washed out.
Finally, I wanted to adjust the order that I paint. What I mean by that is that I wanted to get my brain thinking about painting from light to dark instead of dark to light. It’s hard to do your highlights first.
I am going to continue on this path for a couple weeks, just keeping things simple and practicing my basic techniques. Hopefully that will give me a good, solid foundation that I can use to eventually move on to more complex pieces.
