15-19/30-in-30

Just a quick check-in/drive-by arting:

I've finished ten of the stack of undone canvases so far.  I'm working on a few more tonight/this (early) morning, and hoping to finish another ten before Monday.

Of those, these are my favorites so far.  I Am The Night, Rabbit Rising, The Professor, You Can't Go Home Again, and Bask.

They all have stories.  Because they always do.  I'll post them, eventually.

For now, it's about finishing. (Thanks, Mercury retrograde!)

Not So Secret Shame, and 12/30 Breakup Perks

Everybody has one.

Some kind of secret shame that they don't want anyone to see.  Something that bugs them, but not bad enough to, y'know, change it or anything, just enough to kind of hope that visitors don't notice.

This is mine.

Over the past six months or so, I've amassed a pretty huge stack of things in progress.  Which, really, given that I do that a lot in every other area of my life, shouldn't be that surprising, but the volume of said stack is pretty gnarly, even for me.

See, my process is sort of non-linear.  When I'm not feeling particularly detail-oriented, or I just can't think of what to do next with a canvas, I can often set it aside, work on a first layer or two of something else, and come back to the problem child later, with fresh eyes.  Most of the time, that'll fix it.  It's only in a small percentage of things does it not work.

So when I'm producing a whole ton of work, like I have in the past six months or so, the actual numbers with those percentages goes right through the roof.  Ten percent of ten may only be a stray canvas, but ten percent of a hundred is a giant freakin' stack.  Like this one.  And like its friends, the other two stacks like this.

My goal, then, is to work through the problem children for the rest of this month.

It's a slower process, and can be a little frustrating, and sometimes the solution to the problem is to take a really big brush and some nice, opaque paint and paint all the way over it, but when there's this much backlog...it's time.

Which leads us to today's Finishing Of The Canvases:

12/30
Breakup Perks
6x6" 

Joyce, the monster of mismatched socks, wasn't sure what to do with herself now that she and her longtime boyfriend broke up.  All she really wanted to do was sit around and mope, an urge she indulged quite often.  But now, on day six post-that guy, she was discovering that the free reign she was suddenly afforded wasn't all that bad.  She could sleep on the whole bed.  She didn't have to check in with anybody.  She could order pizza with anchovies if she wanted to, since there was nobody else's preferences to consider.

And nobody questioned her when she binged on giant shrimp and beer for breakfast, either.

She'd be okay.

10/30 Yesterday

10/30
Yesterday
6x6"

Yesterday, Rocket had a forever home.  That, however, was before his human went somewhere and didn't come home.  All the people who'd come into his home since then had pet him and loved on him and looked at him with sad eyes, but even when Rocket asked as nicely as he knew how, none of them could tell him where his human had gone.  One of them said she would take him with her, now that her dad had passed, whatever that meant, and Rocket was glad for the company.  He'd go with her until his own human came back, though he was getting a panicky feeling that maybe he wouldn't be back, though he couldn't tell exactly why.

When she let him out into the yard one more time, he worried it might be the last.  So he stood at his sentinel spot in the back corner, where he could see both approaching sidewalks, and looked hard, just in case they'd missed his human, but no familiar faces approached.  He perked up his  ears, the one his human had said was goofy and always flopped up over his head like a particularly unfortunate hat, but there were no familiar sounds.

Still, yesterday had been a normal day.  And here, it still smelled like yesterday.

He'd stay for just a little while longer.

Just in case.

7/30 WILD

Technically, I guess, this doesn't really fall under the 30 in 30.  It does, since I finished it tonight.  But it got its start about a month ago.

She started out as a largely pink and yellow field.  I'd challenged myself to not use my favorite (read: big) brushes, despite the fact that this is a much bigger canvas than I'm using most often.  (It's 16x20", rather than the 6x6" that I've been working with primarily.)  I had a small (size 2) brush, and as elements came forward, I tried to just keep it to expressive strokes, rather than worrying all the lines, as I'm prone to do.

This is also much more color than I'm used to.  I'm fond of darker, less bright colors.  More muted than in your face, so every time I wanted to grab something grey, I grabbed another bright color intead.  It wasn't until the black and white settled things down a little that I started liking it, but I'm still glad I let the color not just sing, but shout like its head was on fire.

Also, I'm finally going through all my lessons for Diane Culhane's Paint Your Garden class, so there's lots of scratchings and pencil sgraffito and pontillism-style dots, some of which were eventually covered, but which really add a texture I wouldn't have had otherwise.

And despite all the departures from my usual process (which is why it sat, sometimes for a week at a time, with nothing getting done), I think it still manages to look like me, so I'm okay with it all.  I even really like it, truth be told.

There's something magical happening by painting every day.

I'm glad I'm on board for it.

7/30
WILD

(16x20" on canvas)

ignore the messy desk -- painting every day does have its downside. :)

06/30 Trade?

06/30
Trade?

5x7" on canvas board.

I'll give you my heart for this radish.

or a banana.  Dinosaurs like bananas.

5/30 Resolutions

5/30
Resolutions?

Mister Fluffy "Biggie" Picklepants hated it when his friends would make subtle suggestions that maybe a gym membership would be a good thing, but sitting here today, trying to find his toes, he had the thought that perhaps a *wee* bit less kibble and a few more roamings about the house wouldn't be a *bad* idea.

Maybe some low-fat treats wouldn't go awry, either.

4/30 Vile Wizardry

4/40
Vile Wizardry

After fleeing at top speed for more than half an hour, Jack found that the wicked creature was still in close pursuit, undeterred by his flight. He vowed to find the cause of this vile wizardry and to end the pink, squeaky reign of terror, if he did so with his last breath.

To be fair, the pink balloon's alias was "The Helium-Filled Death Monkey", so....

3/30

03/30
Baby, It's Cold Outside.

...but honey badger don't care.  Not when he's got this spiff sweater and the warmest scarf in the world.

..but really, he just don't care.

Harbinger

Harbinger: 2/30

Harbinger
2/30
Every word out of Ricky's mouth was a prophecy.  The problem was that nobody paid any attention to what he was saying; they were distracted instead by his very large, very perfect teeth instead.

He considered a veil, briefly, but decided, ultimately, that people will notice what they want to notice and if they didn't want to know what was going to happen to their petunias, then it wasn't up to him to make them listen.

So there.

Misprompted Myself

I completely forgot I made this box.

When I initially signed up for this round of the 30 paintings in 30 days, I made this box full of the hundred most beautiful words in the english language (according to the all-knowing internet, at least), and set them aside.

And then promptly forgot where I put the box.  (Which is doubly-funny, since I joked on facebook that that's what I was totally going to do.  Apparently, I have a pattern.)

So from here on out, I'll be drawing a word and trying to relate it somehow to what I'm painting for the next 30 paintings.

Should be fun, now that I remember it's there. :)

1 of 30-in-30: Carl's Stick

Carl didn't care who was judging him, or what they were judging him for, exactly.  All he knew is that he found this stick, by golly, and that meant it was his.

Finders keepers, after all.

MINE!  MINEMINEMINE.