This is the fun part?

Let's talk. Pull up a chair and open your ear hole to this. Now tell me I'm not crazy (oh, yeah, and this is gonna be chaulk-full of visuals so you can see what I'm talking about here).

After about four hours of outlining the pencil sketch, I started to really get the I-don't-know-what-the-hell-I'm-doing feeling about what I was doing. The line quality (and I use the term "Quality" here as a quantifier, not a judgement-word) was really too chunky for my tastes. Looking at yesterday's post you can see what I mean. So I start to change-up my style and experiment a little bit. Better now than later. What I came up with was a distinctly different approach to shading the little critters that looked like this:


Lighter, more expressive, less fill-in-the-blanky. I like the Wash look. It is better than a solid color, more spacial (special, too!). Missy agreed, and she's smarter than me, so I know I'm right.

So this is a problem. What do I do with the completed section from yesterday. I jump into it and try to save it a bit:


This is Case 1. It started off as a flesh tone and then I painted over it with white when I decided it looked like a fourth grader did it. It still looks like a fourth grader did it.

something different, keep moving, don't fuss and holler over a little artistic opposition:


Case 2. I started this off as a deep red and when it looked a shitty mess, I remember my "white solution" (how's that for sounding racial?) with Case 1 and fixed 'er up. Not to bad. Case 3 and 4 went pretty much the same:


started off blue, add some white. The problem here is that I'm fighting the drawing. The initial dark color (i.e; deep red then white, blue then white) is that I'm stuck with my old painting style and it's pissing me off. The colors look better laying over darks, but painting it dark first looses most of the work that went into the template of the sketch. Which takes us back to liking the washes. The light painting leaves the sketch as the dominant force behind defining these figures. Fuck it! One more try at the old shit before I forswear it to history:


this one turns out pretty well, but you get a couple of 'em together and:


FUCK IS THAT UGLY!!! Now realistically, I could finish it off in this manner, but it's just looking towards being a disgusting eye-sore (and it still looks like a fourth grader did it, which is cool, but I'm more of an early-thirties sorta guy).

At this point I give some color washes a try:


This, I like. Had to work around some black details that I had already painted, but the combo looks pretty good. From scratch, no black, just a nice color wash, we get:


Now, I'm thinking that a bunch of these could actually sit next to eachother without the weight and eye-heavy-shit-appeal of the previous calamity. Only problem is it only really works out when there isn't any BIG BLACK HEAVY OUTLINES already and I've put about four hours of those on already.

You see where this is going right?

You guessed it:

Gotta start over. An entire week of drawing and feeling like I really accomplished something productive is always the first sign of some bad shit on the way. That's the artistic process. Maybe if I didn't sporadically takes three year breaks with my painting I'd remember that. Besides, this is the reason I made two framed boards in the first place.

Now that I've therapuetically got it all off my chest and onto the computer (cause, really, what's more fun than sharing the failure) I will start again from scratch. It will feel like complete insanity whiting over last week's work (I'll save that for tomorrow), but I guess in some ways it will feel great too. Like burning photos of people you have decided to "X-out" of your life (not that I've ever done that, but I probably should).

Fuck Tomahawk,
-m