As much as I'd like to take a day and go hike somewhere beautiful to paint, it's much easier and realistic to not do that. And that's okay. While I don't have a fancy marble fountain in my yard, the bird bath provided by a previous owner is a fine subject. And so are birthday parties.
Keep practicing the things I'm not good at because, well, how else am I supposed to suck less? It's neat to see progress. And continually humbling as I gain appreciation for the skill and technique of the artists out there who make things look effortless. Talent, sure. And thousands of hours of work. Never discount the work, effort.
I'm a fiend for the confident loose sketches of urban artists and watercolorists who can paint buildings and make them blend in with everything else. And it's going to take hundreds, thousands of practice attempts. Maybe, one day, I'll get smart about my process and more efficiently iterate on smaller details. No. That's silly talk. And two film students make a boom boom.
I watched a tutorial that was supposed to transform my buildings from boring to better. It took a few tries and... slightly better? They're just boxes, how hard can this really be? It's wild how something that looks so easy requires a lot of practice when the easy doesn't come natural. Also, bulldozers are cool.
Discouragement. It sucks the motivation right out of me. These five attempts at an old seaside manor were tough to do because I kept doing things that didn't produce the results I wanted. That's part of learning, right? I need to try and fail a lot. Fail repeatedly and hopefully learn from the mistakes. Also, a human in charge of capital golfs no more.
It gets easier to give myself room to play and not expect too much from what I try. And I sometimes use movies as sources of inspiration on what to practice, especially with faces which will remain a challenge for the foreseeable future.
I pass by a beautiful grazing pasture with a small river frequently and, ever since taking up art, have wanted to paint it. This is my third attempt. I still have a lot of practice to do. Back to the original, did I intend to paint this pasture with the forethought it'd go on this site and be related with a story about wealthy death? No. And that's okay, too; my site, my rules.
Sometimes I'll spy a weed growing out of the street and smile. That a seed found it's way to fertile ground and springs upward out of a concrete crack. Nature's rad. More rad than an expansive data center, even if its foundation contains a tomb.
A neighborhood lemonade stand manned by children who sell Molotov cocktails. That was the idea. I initially tried and failed because complex scenes are beyond me. And that's okay, because I'll try again. Such as with the watercolor of matches which are an integral part of arming any Molotov cocktail. Then, a couple of months later, some watercolor sketches of people holding flaming bottles. Are they awesome? No. That stroller in the new version is WAY better than the stroller in the original. And that I am happy about.
I guess this is more a practice of patience than anything interesting. The story was stuck in my head. I had to go with stairs at a gala type of event. And it's obvious from the noodly ascending lines for stairs there's room for improvement. Not that I want to draw technical stairs. There's visual tricks to make things in the distance a bit abstract, less defined, yet still obvious as to what it is. Things to learn.
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