Cliche

Cliche
Originally uploaded by SunToad.

Sometimes quick and easy seems to be anything but. This painting, for example.

I had wanted to paint something my wife would like. Let me clarify: my wife likes my art. Especially when I draw little cartoons and make comics for her. She doesn't really care for my paintings though and I have never really managed to do one that she thought was more than just nice. And by nice, I mean, she might think it's good but just isn't her taste at all. And we have wildly different tastes in art: I like pop-art, with bright colors and odd angles and fragments of things. She likes soft, pretty art - landscapes and scenery and realistic visions.

This painting was an attempt to create something she would like without going outside the boundaries of what I enjoy painting. A compromise, if you will.

After all, isn't that how marriage works? Compromise?

Anyway. The painting started life as a photograph taken by someone whose photo was included in a backgrounds package I got with an old computer. I would credit it if I could, but it was a stock image without any accreditation built in; I had never painted a sunset, for all that they are one of the most visible and cliched images out there and decided that the time had come for me to try my hand at one.

Things started well. I laid down a thin line of each of the colors and then used a small brush to begin to blend them together, taking time and care to clean the brush between color sets so that red blended only to orange and orange blended only to yellow and so on. I gave the background a day or so to dry before laying on the black (actually all the leftover color blended together).

This particular canvas is on the small side, about five by seven inches and I was holding it in my left hand while I applied color with my right. I'm not sure what happened, or why, but I dropped it. Face down.

I was able to salvage most of the background but the palm tree had become unrecognizable. I wiped it and most of the surrounding background paint off and gave it a day or three to dry out.

Once dry, I used a small brush coated in paint thinned to loosen the dried background colors, and then another brush to drag the remaining colors to the left. When that was dry I applied a second layer of background color and eventually was able to replace the palm tree and city scape as well.

Unfortunately, the blending did not take as well the second time around, possibly because of the paint thinner I had had to use, possibly because I was too irritated to concentrate properly.

In the end, I do like the final image, and, more importantly, so does my wife. While I do think it is a cliched image, I learned a bit more about blending and layering, which, really, is the point behind all of this, so I'm calling it successful.

As for the next painting, I've already got an idea in mind, and I know, already, that my wife is going to hate it.

This entry is cross-posted to Painted Toad.