Remember and Inspire.
"Her Grandmother's Sewing Machine" (progress in progress)
Her Grandmothers' Sewing Machine
As I was working on this (still far from finished) commissioned piece today, my thoughts landed on why people paint realism. It’s a topic that surfaces in various art blogs from time to time. Sometimes people can be quite dogmatic in their assertion that people paint realism because they have no imagination. I was going to rant about it here. I even had it all written out. But then I realized that my angst was not worth the negative energy and decided to just let it go. Not everyone loves every genre. Oh well. Moving on.
Today was breakthrough day! I hit a wall a couple of weeks ago when it came to the metallic embellishments on the machine. I wanted to render them as accurately as possible, but I just felt stuck. People sometimes lament that they can’t draw a straight line. Well I can’t either. I use a ruler. But I didn’t want to pencil in all that detail and I don’t trust my freehand skills for drawing such fine detail with a brush alone.
Then came Thanksgiving and it took awhile to get back on the horse, so to speak.
Today I determined that I wasn’t leaving the studio until I at least had them blocked in. A thousand and one distractions threatened to pull me away. I was tempted to procrasti-clean my house. I almost resorted to procrasti-baking. But I just kept pushing until I came up with a solution. I drew the embellishments in detail on paper, scanned them onto my computer and then played with the vectoring tools til I had it just right. Then I printed out the right size and cut just a tad in from the edge of each image. Finally, I laid them on the painting (already dry from the last session) and traced around them with a tiny paintbrush. Once I had the outline and the detailed drawings to refer to, I felt confident to do the rest freehand. Although I’m not as far as I wanted to be, I feel that the hardest part is behind me and I can now concentrate on rendering the painting’s story and refining the technical aspects. One day, I hope to be counted among the realist painters I so admire. All in good time.
See, isn’t pushing through an obstacle so much more satisfying than ranting about someone else’s sour grapes? Just sayin.’
If you were inspired, encouraged, or merely entertained, please leave a comment.
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