a little wild and in motion

This has been such a wonderful painting to carry from beginning to end. It’s been about a year since I started putting down my first ideas for it, nearly three months since I started working in earnest on the final product, and I can tell that I’ve grown as an artist in that time. Here are some of the steps in this painting’s process.

This was my first study of what the painting might look like. I had an idea of some of the colors I wanted to use but everything else from this draft was eventually abandoned. I did like this draft — it just wasn’t where my heart was headed for this painting.

In the second study I experimented with adding more movement to the image and extra splashes of color, and using yellow as the base layer.

The third study is where I started grasping the ultimate composition of the piece. In fact, after this study my plan for the final product had included a contrasting shape like the red ‘S’ (probably in a pale orange or grey) until the very end when I decided it wasn’t necessary.

My tools for the canvas were a kitchen spatula and a palette knife. In a few places you can see a cool texture created by the holes in the spatula. Applying paint to this large canvas was nothing like applying paint to the small pieces of paper I’d used for my studies, which is what forced me to push beyond the scattered design of green shapes from my third study and create something more whole.