ARW Days 1 and 2: Preparation-ish

My thought was to try and complete my big ol' SRII* journal.


My heart was in the right place.

However, my heart seems to have forgotten two things:


  1. Paint does not dry instantly.
    Not even in 90-degree heat.  At least, not when there's also 80+% humidity.  The paint just sits there in a pool, fanning its face, and laughing at you behind its perfectly manicured hand.  Paint is sloooooow sometimes.
  2. There are a lot of pages in that book.
    Seriously.  The thing's, like, two inches thick.  There are more than two hundred pages.  I can do two about every fifteen minutes, even WITH a fan and a heat gun helping me, without having the pages go all mind-meld on each other.  Which means that after working for two days on them pretty much solidly....?  I've done maybe fifty backgrounds.

Let us just say that this is slower and less productive than I'd like.  


I'm probably going to lay off the painting for the rest of this week and just concentrate on filling the pages of a different practice journal.  Read some books and do some exercises instead.  Maybe paint a page or two every time I'm over there near the desk by the acrylic paints, but....no.  

Of course, this means that the retreat week is doing exactly what I wanted it to do:  to show me what's possible in a week.

I think I'm going to end up finding that I can draw/watercolor more practice pages than I can more formal or more collagey pages.  I'm generally much slower at that kind of artwork anyway -- it's not really my natural inclination, but I love the finished result so much that I do it regardless.

So I've got three books set aside, and a whole whack of classes I can work through if I want to tomorrow (if I don't end up finally heading to the Fair to draw prize-winning cows and such).  

Oh, and I had a big Happy today when I finally figured out how my overhead camera thing works.

Now I just have to figure out how my *camera* works for video, and how to edit said video, and I'm gonna be able to let you see exactly what I'm doing on art weeks.  I expect the first few to kind of suck, but I'll probably be super-proud of them anyway.  Sorry in advance for any squealing you might have to listen to.  I'm gonna feel like Spielberg even if the camera jumps around more than a caffeine-addicted kangaroo.


*SRII

A few years back, I took Melody Ross's Soul Restoration II class (which I think she's changed the name of now, to Life Restoration).  One of the activities is building a book, separated into sections, kind of like a book-bound vision board in six or eight different categories.  

That book is one of my favorite possessions.  It's broken, dirty, and smells like tornado.  Pieces of muddy corn fall out of it when I open it.  Some parts are really damaged.  I don't care.  I keep it anyway.

Some of it, though, is a little dated now.  My perspective's different from how it was five years ago.  There are different things I want.  Fewer things.  More important things to me.

So my thought was to do another book, which is exactly what I'm doing.

(I just forgot how long it took me to paint the backgrounds last time, and they were much smaller sections with that one.  Hooboy.  Long-term project, it is.)

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