Photographs and Quick Paintings

I take a lot of photos with my little cheap point-and-shoot.  Some come out really bad, and some come out pretty good--good enough to use as references for painting!  But usually I don't think of the photos themselves as art; they're just a means to capture pretty moments to remember them or to paint them later.  But I like these two photos better as photos than as things to paint, I think.  I tried painting one of them, and the results of that are further below.  

Antholz is so beautiful when its sunny and you can see the mountains...but I tried taking pictures of this shed when it was sunny, and I didn't like them nearly as much.  (Antholz, Italy)

Maybe I should have converted these to black and white...they almost already are, anyway. 

Looking at this now, I could really go back and work on it some more, and it would probably get a lot better. Maybe I'll still do that.  But at the time, I just wanted to do a quick painting and use my masking fluid some more.  

I used the masking fluid for this one too.  I really only did it because when I went to use my paper-block, the top sheet had a blue smear left on it, so I had to paint this one before I could paint the one above.  They're meant to be aspens, but they came out looking a lot more like birch trees.  

Pigs and Lessons

Oop, I thought I'd published this last week, but then I signed on to make a new post, and this was still just a draft!  So now its even later than before.  I'd blame it on the really terrible internet here in Italy, but its probably just my fault.  Here it is: 

I'm sorry to everyone that I went for so long without posting anything.  I'm also just sorry that I didn't  paint more in the last few months...painting always makes me happy.  But its also not that I wasn't painting at all; it was that I'd stalled on a painting.  And I should have known better.  I'd decided that since I'd had so much fun making my previous pig painting,  I would do another one.  I'd been struggling to come up with a new idea for a painting, and this was the best I could think of, but I just wasn't that excited about it at the time.  And I started it on big paper, in a very detailed style.  So I ened up working on it very slowly,  in a somewhat-less-than-enthusiastic manner for a long time.  Like all of my paintings, it went through some stages where I almost decided that it was really awful an wasn't worth continuing to work on.  But I wouldn't let my self start another one until it was done.  Finally by the end of it, as I was getting happier with how it looked, I got into it and was having more fun.  And I'm quite happy with it now.  So I learned a few lessons:  

1.  It really is worth pushing through the ugly-phase to try to make paintings better.

2.  Make sure I'm really excited about an idea before I start painting.

3. There isn't really any reason to make myself finish one painting before starting another, especially if 

it means that I'll paint more.

4.  I should do more smaller, quicker paintings, to help get myself re-energized for painting. 

So now I hope to be doing more painting and more posting!  Right now I'm in Antholz, Italy for biathlon World Cup races.  So expect some Italian Alps paintings soon!