Decorating Advice and Paint Colors

I always thought that I couldn’t paint people.  If I did try to paint people, I definitely couldn’t paint them in watercolors.  No one could paint them in watercolors.  I found a tutorial & ended up painting this person.  I was surprised at how it turned out, not that it was actually good, but because I could actually make out the shape of a person. Granted, she ended up little heavier than I had intended.  So, it is possible, as long as the painting is kept quite loose.  Maybe, I’ll have to try again & see what the girl would look like after weight watchers.

This is one of my favorite paintings & it’s one of my first watercolors.  It doesn’t have a name, poor thing. I think I like it because of the simplicity of techniques.  As I painted more, I worried about all the little details, but here the paint really speaks.  Talking paint, scary huh?

I wish it had some great story behind it, like I was channeling the grief I felt when my dog was sick.  However, I don’t remember when I painted, or even why. In fact, I’ve ever tried to recreate it on several occasions & it just doesn’t turn out the same.  The lesson is here, sometimes it just works.  Even though it’s a rare & fleeting thing at least when I paint, it makes all of the times when the paintings turn out "icky" worth it.

I was looking through my old art portfolio & discovered that I am unusually talented at painting seafood.  This is unusual because I don’t really like seafood, & I live in the desert so I usually can’t even find it at the grocery store. I would much rather be talented at landscapes or even portraits.  Nope.  I’m the Monet of seafood.  Don’t believe me?  Here’s a salmon I painted:

Here’s a crustacean.

Van Gogh had his sunflowers, & I have this. Yup, I’ve got really mad skills.  Maybe I can get a job working for the advertising & artistic rendering department at Red Lobster.

Tags: ocean, painting, painting tutorial, humor

Usually when I sit down to paint, I have everything laid out.  I know what colors & techniques I’m going to use, & what picture or tutorial I will work from.  This painting happened one day when I sat down & didn’t know what to paint.  I had a lot of time on my hands & the painting was getting finished much too fast for my liking, so I turned the beach into a series of small dots which I had never done before.  Then I took a dry brush & brushed the colors together for an aged effect.  I couldn’t have done this well if I had tried.  Sometimes it pays to just let yourself go & let the painting just happen.

I sat down the other day to paint this:

This is what came out:

What?  You notice the difference too?  My painting didn’t photograph well, it really doesn’t look that messy.  Anyways, it’s not my fault that I can’t paint a valley or close up plants to save my life, but I can paint mountains & dramatic skies.  Ok, so that is kinda my fault.  My point is that I still like the finished painting even though it wasn’t what I had planned.