New Painting

Nebula
9” x 12”
acrylic on paper

Mystical New Painting

Initiation

9" x 12"

Acrylic on paper

Last week I returned to painting. It’s been a while and remembering how to play with paint again, this piece of watercolor paper began yielding something wondrous.

This has happened before. I’ll be mindlessly rolling paint around when light and shadow will appear and I will be filled with delightful discovery. Since nothing was planned, I often feel like an archeologist finding an object in a dig and need to clear away the encrusted surface to bring a treasure to life.

If I had consciously set out to paint this mystical image, it would not be nearly so powerful to me. It might lack great technical skill or refinement since I’m often afraid to overwork such a piece thus losing its raw intent. So, I might not have nailed this one. It might not communicate effectively what I felt, but I’m pleased to have uncovered it.

IFJM Ends and Summing Up

Here are catch-up spreads in my Fake Journal.

Unlike last year, I got an idea two weeks before April 1 but felt I couldn’t start in it yet. It might have helped if I had, at least gotten some of the design clients decided and some color swatches and magazine samples done ahead of time. Because by the time I started, my enthusiasm began to wane.

However, some good things happened in keeping a Fake Journal this month:

I experimented with a new medium: Inktense pencils with stamp pad backgrounds.
I discovered a way to make a “stamp” with the pencils and had fun playing.
I learned about steampunk, which knew nothing about.
I enjoying using a larger version of the Hand Book (just the second; 2009’s Fake Journal in a smaller green was the first). I liked the way the paper took gel pens, gel brushes, Inktense pencils with water. It’s still too scratchy for Micron pens, though.

With muted enthusiasm, I almost quit early but I still had a few more spreads in Sydney’s book.