Boy, a Nap Sounds So Good Right Now. Part One.

 Lately, I've found myself caught in a bit of a creative quagmire. Sometimes when I'm feeling stuck and unmotivated in my art-job, instead of napping I manage it by experimenting with something new and unfamiliar to get me excited to work again.
So I had this old wood panel in my hand, and I thought, what if I add some oil paint, a sprinkle of self-doubt, and a dash of questionable decision-making? And then what if I shared that mess with all of my friends?
I was pretty sure all that sounded like a recipe for disaster, but hey, who doesn't love a good disaster when it's not happening to you?
So here we are.

 I learned a hard lesson on this one years ago, so I knew that the wood needed a sealer before the oil paint went on. I drew directly on the wood and then panicked. Was the primer going to smear the drawing I already spent way too much time on? I went ahead and applied several coats of clear gesso anyway and sanded between layers. It clouded the drawing a little-but yay, no tears so far!

 For any artists who are curious, I got the clear gesso on the Amazon beast. I bought it initially to seal some blank matryoshka dolls I want to paint.

  






Then I started adding thin layers of oil paint over the drawing. Because I worked WAY too small as usual, I used all kinds of weird tools to help me out, like q-tips and toothpicks and teeny bits of scrunched up paper towels.

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 I got this far and panicked again. I had started to do some really thin, precise outlining of my drawing with black oil paint for a more graphic look. But then I realized that if I made a mistake and tried to fix it, the black paint would smear into the existing wet paint and ruin all the colors. So. I'm going to let this layer dry for a week so I can more easily wipe off any major mistakes and maybe avoid the crying and stuff. 
Part Two of this possibly calamitous creative detour will be in the next post.

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