Working With Paint

You can't have a fear of commitment and work with watercolor paints.  Watercolor paint is hard to control where is goes and once it touches the paper mistakes are hard to deal with.   Oil pants are more forgiving.  You can continue to work with blending the colors and changing strokes.  You can keep the painting a work in progress, changing your mind until it feels done.  Even after oil paint dries, if you aren't satisfied with the results you can simply paint over the image like the first try didn't ever exist.  It has been a long time since I've made art.  When I did, I preferred to work with colored pencils--they are able to be erased.  Whatever medium you chose it is important that you understand its nature so you aren't trying to work against it.

My Remo drum needed to be decorated and the type of paint required was acrylic.  Acrylic paint has the same consistency of oil so I wasn't too concerned about technique.  However, the drum is special to me so I was a little nervous I would wreck it.  I carefully plotted out the design and started at the bottom where I was planning to represent the ocean.  I liked how the color looked--it was hard to tell from the sample exactly how it would turn out and as an added bonus the light could still show through the drum head.  However the paint dried much faster than I anticipated so I had to commit quickly and decisively.  The water actually came out better than I hoped it would--the variations in the amount of paint were similar to the ocean with patches of darker and lighter areas.

A teacher of mine was an accomplished artist.  She had the right temperament and steady hand to work with watercolors.  Some of her works were large and detailed and I would marvel at the perfection of them particularly knowing how difficult the medium is to work with.   But not everything came out as she planned.  One time she was working on a painting with cool muted that was almost complete.   There was a spot of red paint from another project that got on her hand without her knowledge and when she went to put one of the final strokes on her painting, the red transferred from her hand to the paper.  She was understandably upset  Her painting ruined and a lot of time "wasted."  A few days later she glanced at the paper and realized that while her original idea was not going to happen she could work with what she had.  She changed the red dot into a little person hanging from the scene and it added visual interest and whimsy that was missing from her vision before.