work in progress

Two girl and bird paintings that I started working on a couple weeks ago. I got to the “have to let this dry because I’m turning everything into mud” stage. I’m painting these in oils, and as you probably know, oil takes forever to dry. So, they’ve been sitting on the shelf above my desk, and I must say, it’s hard for me to sit here every day and see these unfinished paintings staring back at me. I am extremely anal retentive about finishing what I start.

I wasn’t always like this, I was actually the complete opposite, and hardly ever finished what I began painting. I paid for it dearly when I ended up with over 100 unfinished paintings stacked up in a corner to deal with back in 2009 or 2010. It took me forever to go through all of them, and most got painted over because the moment had long passed. I didn’t want to finish them at that point. It was a huge lesson for me to learn, and that’s why I prefer to paint alla prima now, which is Italian for “at first attempt”. 

 
Oil palette I used on these paintings

It means to apply oil paint wet-on-wet, so you can finish it all in one sitting. I usually paint this way, but for some reason, I couldn’t pull it off with these two paintings. I didn’t have the patience to deal with the paint getting muddy because I was blending too much. You have to keep a very light touch on the knives when you paint like this, and I didn’t have it that night. I felt incompetent, off my game, and knew I better stop before I end up scraping both of them down to the canvas. I hate wasting paint, especially oil because it’s super expensive. 

These are dry enough to continue painting them now, so you know what I’ll be doing today. 🙂 Yup, I’ll be starting an unfinished pile in the corner of my studio. NOT! haha Never again!!