It’s good to have choices and options. You don’t feel as trapped, stuck, or stifled. You can choose a different thing to do, to eat, to read, to listen to, to wear, you name it. Sometimes though, all those options and choices can make the situation more difficult. For example, getting dressed in the morning when you can wear anything you have in your closet, because there is no dress code for the day. You could have 5 different favorite shirts that you could wear and they are all clean. How long does it take you to decide which shirt to wear when you want to wear them all? The same type of dilemma sometimes happens to me when I want to make art.
Not only do I have a large number of reference photos to choose from, in those photos I have several different themes or topics to choose from. Add to that, I like to work in several different mediums. This often makes starting a new painting or drawing a time consuming process. I spend hours looking through photos until I finally decide on something. Sometimes I will start with one theme and then change my mind and look through photos of a different theme. And once I decide on one photo, or even a few, then I find myself trying to decide how I want to create the art. I suppose it’s a good thing that I don’t also sculpt. I have enough choices as it is.
There are several ways I can create art. I started out with pencil. Simple graphite pencil. I had watercolors and watercolor pencils early on though I didn’t really use them much. Then I had a chance to really use the watercolors so I got a little better with that. Along the way I picked up some soft pastels and did a piece or two with those. And then I tried stippling with ink and acrylic ink and had a lot of success creating that way. I tried acrylic paint with a brush, and fortunately for me, I didn’t like it. It was fortunate because it removes an option for me. Most recently I tried oil painting, and happen to really like that. I’ve even done some 3D computer art/sculpting.
With all of these options, it can be a challenge to find an artistic identity. Which is something I’ve been struggling with. How do I define or describe my art? I can’t really say I’m a “x-artist” because I don’t stick with just one thing. Or I haven’t been. I’ve decided to change that for the most part. I am excited and relieved, and also a bit terrified.
Aside from all the branding, marketing, and business reasons to make this decision, there is a creative one. There is an artist I came across on Instagram, Kimberly Djehanian (@Kimberly.djehanian on Instagram). She paints frogs. She paints frogs in all kinds of scenes and environments. She recently posted a reel about why she paints frogs. It was an artistic challenge. By limiting her subject she would have to be more creative in what she did with them to keep them interesting to her. Working within narrow constraints can be very helpful with stretching your creativity, growing in your medium, and sometimes it’s even freeing. Because it filters out a lot of noise. Like for me, trying to decide what medium to use to create with, or what to paint.
I’m not ready to stick to painting just one thing. I still have a lot of stuff that I would like to paint, or attempt to paint, and a few things that I just really like to paint, that I’m not ready to remove from the equation. That means that if I want to narrow my focus my best option is for me to limit my medium. This was not an easy choice. I really like having versatility, and being able to create in many different mediums. Though, there are things I like and don’t like about all the mediums I use, including acrylics which I’ve already removed from the list so they don’t matter for this. The decision has been even more difficult with my recent foray into oil painting. I love how the easy I found it, getting what I wanted on the canvas, and the appeal of working on canvas or canvas board without worrying about the pastel dust and how to keep it from rubbing off, or the paper warping with the watercolor, and then how to protect that. Oil painting is very appealing. And I still want to do more even if it can take a long time to dry.
So here’s what I’ve decided to do. I’m going to focus on being a Watercolor artist. I’m going to leave a little room for the occasional piece in oil or something else if warranted because, like not being willing to give up some themes or subjects for painting, I’m not ready to give up on the possibility of oil painting. What this looks like in practice for me is that when I choose a subject to paint, my first choice of medium will be watercolor. If I can’t make that work for some reason, then I’ll use something else. Also, on the side, or as a secondary, I want to spend some more time working in oil to see if I can get the same atmosphere with it that I get from watercolor. And, because of the difference of what I feel I can do in oil versus watercolor I think the oil practice will help make my watercolor work even better.
So watercolor it is. Now, with that declared, I started out trying to do just what I said. I decided to paint a passion flower that my sister took a picture of. I was going to do it in watercolor. I thought I’d finally figured out how to do it, and that it would work ok since I was going to make it a little larger than some of the other watercolor flowers I’ve done. The sketch went ok, though I did have to re-draw the tendril like bits a couple of times. I got them so they looked good and started to use some masking fluid to mask them off so I could use the white of the paper since white paint in watercolor is a challenge. I have this bottle of masking fluid with a really thin sort of nozzle and it looked like it was going to work. And then it didn’t. By the time I finished masking off all the tendrils, I knew. That wasn’t going to be an option. Then, as I was rubbing off the masking, it left a bit of a shadow behind so that really wasn’t going to work.
After doing all that work, I thought about abandoning the idea of painting this flower. I haven’t, at least not yet. I’m going to try it in oil. I was working on watercolor paper which can work well for oil if you prime it. Since I already had a sketch down, I cleaned it up a bit and then used a transparent gesso over it. I think this might work. I may also need to pick up a few more tubes of paint. I don’t know if I have enough to make good green variations.
I have another painting planned that has a better chance of working out as a watercolor. It will probably be the largest watercolor painting I’ve done so far and that feels a little weird. It’s from another photo that my sister took and it’s of a Blue Herron. It’s quite a stunning shot, I hope I can do it justice.
And that’s it for this post. I wanted to include some pictures from the false starts on the passion flower, except you can’t see very well what it going on so here are some cool clouds I’ve seen recently.
Cheers!