Unfortunately, painting is a use it or lose it skill. After a pretty long hiatus, I’m trying to paint again and finding out that I’ve lost a lot of what I had gained over the last few years of consistent painting. All of the effortless color mixing I was doing this time last year is out of my grasp. I have to really think about what I’m doing, which distracts me from being immersed in the act of painting itself.
I have a plan to get back my lost skills though. The plan is to force myself to paint every day again… or nearly every day. I made a false start about two weeks ago and churned out three paintings, but had decided to be nice to myself and not force myself to paint and stress myself. However, after the first three days, I started a fourth painting that sat half finished for days that turned into weeks. I left it in the way, in the middle of my dining room, where I had to stare at it every day, hoping it would motivate me. It didn’t. Finally, I decided I was out of excuses and finished it. It’s hard to be nice to myself about painting when being nice means I don’t paint.
Color mixing is harder than I remember, but to be fair, I added a whole bunch of new colors to my palette to play with. I’ve been using just three colors (Cadmium Yellow Medium, Quinacridone Red, and Phthalo Blue) and white, but wanted to mix things up a bit. I still have those three colors, but I’m debating on removing all of them in favor of different primaries that’ll force me to explore new color combinations.
All of the colors I added are from my collection of paint, but are colors that I haven’t used in a long time or haven’t really used before. Since I’m focusing on landscapes right now, I decided to add a lot of warm earthy tones and green, which I rarely include on my palette. New colors added are Yellow Ochre, Indian yellow, Cadmium Red Light, Burnt Sienna, Raw Umber, Green Gold, Sap Green, and Cerulean Blue.
Thank you for reading. I hope this is the start of weekly posts once again. There are a whole slew of small landscape paintings in the pipeline as well as a few larger paintings. See you next week!