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Description
I've been working on this since last Tuesday (or was it Wednesday?). I had to use a limited color palette, (white, black, crimson, and yellow ochre) which ended up being pretty tough. Mixing the paint together was fun (I'm always up for a mess!) and painting with the paint was fun, but using the different colors together correctly on the canvas turned out to be a lot harder than I'd expected. I had a really hard time accepting that I was doing it right during most of the process, and so I would sit down in the afternoon and start painting, excited to play with the oils some more, and then a few hours would pass and the "sparkle" of the activity wore off and I began to see the collection of color splotches as being less and less progress. I should have taken pictures to mark the points I stopped each night, because every time I gave this a rest, I thought it looked absolutely horrendous.

Somehow it turned out, though. I did my best to enjoy the process. My hands had oil paints all over them, I stained at least two articles of clothing, and I've got paint streaks in precise lines (came off of the canvas board edges) running up my forearms and across my legs from holding the piece as I worked on minor portions, background, some palette knife scratch-out, etc. It was awesome.

I love to embrace the mess, but it was hard balancing my preferred method of mess with intentional strokes and controlled paint to do this assignment efficiently, which worked against me (and my enthusiasm) in the long run. =_=

My husband wants me to do more oil work (I think he's thrilled that I've moved past charcoal in portraiture, lol), so this might not be the last oil I post.

Description
I've been working on this since last Tuesday (or was it Wednesday?). I had to use a limited color palette, (white, black, crimson, and yellow ochre) which ended up being pretty tough. Mixing the paint together was fun (I'm always up for a mess!) and painting with the paint was fun, but using the different colors together correctly on the canvas turned out to be a lot harder than I'd expected. I had a really hard time accepting that I was doing it right during most of the process, and so I would sit down in the afternoon and start painting, excited to play with the oils some more, and then a few hours would pass and the "sparkle" of the activity wore off and I began to see the collection of color splotches as being less and less progress. I should have taken pictures to mark the points I stopped each night, because every time I gave this a rest, I thought it looked absolutely horrendous.

Somehow it turned out, though. I did my best to enjoy the process. My hands had oil paints all over them, I stained at least two articles of clothing, and I've got paint streaks in precise lines (came off of the canvas board edges) running up my forearms and across my legs from holding the piece as I worked on minor portions, background, some palette knife scratch-out, etc. It was awesome.

I love to embrace the mess, but it was hard balancing my preferred method of mess with intentional strokes and controlled paint to do this assignment efficiently, which worked against me (and my enthusiasm) in the long run. =_=

My husband wants me to do more oil work (I think he's thrilled that I've moved past charcoal in portraiture, lol), so this might not be the last oil I post.