Hi and thanks for checking out my stuff.
These days it seems that as much as I try to do less seems to get done. That's probably because I was doing an insane amount of work before and needed a LOT of time to try and recharge my batteries, so to speak. As much as we'd like to think that we're unbreakable, this is far from true. I'll get back to this in a minute and what this has to do with me starting back to play around with painting my artwork again after such a long time away from color work. At some point I was just pushing myself too hard and I got a rude wake up call a few weeks ago, I hurt my back and it's been a while that I felt pain quite that intense. So after a trip to the clinic, some time off prescribed by the Doctor and two different types of medications, I was off for my first week.
I'm really not sure if it was the meds or a longing to see my work colored the way I wanted it. Here's the thing, as much as I love working with other colorists, it's a bittersweet collaboration. I'm way too much of a control freak, so either I learn how to color my own work the way I want or content myself with having to burst some poor guy's bubble on his coloring efforts. Which by the way is not something I enjoy doing. Ever. Maybe it was the heavy duty buzz I had during this period that made me willing to explore slinging some paint onto my black and white originals.
For the most part, it was an enjoyable time and as you can see this was my first attempt after several years.
I learned something very important about layering and colors. Overall coloring time was less than an hour. I tried to stay loose, unstressed and see what happened. To any artist this is ideal but the reality is that for most other artist types to get into this zone it happens without our control, which can be a very frustrating thing and that's pretty much what happened to me during the time I was painting this image. Another positive was blending the colors, it was a lot easier than I remembered and that part of this little experiment went off perfectly. I was using incredibly small tipped brushes that I bought cheaply in bulk. I like trying out different types of tools and I'm a firm believer that it's the artist that's the important factor and the tools are secondary. Please remember that this is just an opinion I developed from looking at a few artists that used whatever was at hand and still ended up with awesome looking images. I kept the color scheme based on varying shades of earth colors. That part worked but then I got the bright idea to make the background a shade of rose, not sure why. This is the point where I should have stopped and taken a step back and looked and what I had done. I lost patience and just wanted it done. That was the problem right there. I lost my concentration and just phoned in the background.
I think the fact that once I was done I didn't freak out and quit work for that particular day. I started back drawing another image which I will show at another time but the most important thing I want to talk about is not giving up despite being unhappy with the final result. The next drawing I would do turned out quite amazing And I still went back and painted another image and that too is for another time. For now let's just look at the painted watercolor version that I ended up with. Any comments are greatly appreciated. It's Indiana Jones by the way.
I will be showing a lot more failures as well as those I consider a success.
More to come soon.
Rich.
