Fish painting

I finally have an example of one of my painting with clingfilm post (which proves to be one of the more popular) techniques to show you. I've been writing essays for the past two weeks, and am now waiting for someone to return a book that I really, really need to the library. To take my mind off things, I started to paint again.

Yes, crappy picture, I'm aware of it.

The photo does not show you the colours very well, but at least you can see some of it...
Now this painting was originally something else, which didn't work out, and then I turned it into a green sea-scape with one skeletal fish. I thought it might work well as a companion piece to the bird painting from my first paintings post, because they're kind of looking at each other...

Bird fish combo.

For those still interested in painting with clingfilm, this is what I did:
I first painted the background, let it dry, and then I drew a sort-of fish shape on a separate piece of paper. I scrunched up a bit of clingfilm, unscrunched it, pulled it flat across the paper, and with a small brush painted the fish figure on to the clingfilm. I then scrunched that a bit (not too much, or the paint would've run into each other even more, as it did with the first top 'rib') and put it on my canvas. I let it dry for about an hour before pulling it off.
Now I thought the white contrasted a bit too much with the rest of the painting, so I filled it in with some green, not too much, just a bit on the bottom. You can't really see it in the picture above, but here's a detail:

Even crappier picture, slightly out of focus.

I'm quite happy with how it turned out, even though it does give me a bit of a Greenpeace / save-the-seas / we-humans-are-destroying-the-planet feel. I feel like I could have added some yellow or something, but I didn't, and it turned out a bit darker than I would have anticipated, but maybe that's okay.

Anyway, I've been working on two non-vague, non-abstract, figurative things, which hopefully will be done before my essays are due, because I happen to paint better when I should actually be doing something else. Weird, I know. So, to be continued...

Painting with clingfilm

I've been doing some painting in the last week, and because I heard it was a good method to get some nice effects, I've tried painting with clingfilm. I tried to find a good tutorial online, but the online things I could find (apart from some very stoned YouTube clips) were discussion boards on what-to-do-with-small-children-websites, where mums say that it is an easy and mess-free way to paint. Well, I must be doing something wrong here, because it is definitely not mess-free.
Anyway, I've discovered that there are basically three ways of painting with clingfilm, which will give you three very different effects. Because there is so little to find on the subject online, I'll add these three methods below, so hopefully someone else can benefit too. I don't have any pictures or a finished painting yet, but I hope you can follow me through these descriptions.

1) Take a big piece of clingfilm, at least the size of your canvas. Squirt some paint onto your canvas (one colour or several), scrunch up your clingfilm to get some texture, unscrunch it, put it on top of the paint, and start moving the paint around. You can create nice texture effects, ripples, and let the colours run into each other. When you are done (you can sort of see the effect through the clingfilm) leave it to dry for a looooong time (a day at least, because the paint does not dry very quickly under the clingfilm) before pulling it off. You can pull it off earlier, but then you run the risk of ruining your effect because you pull up paint that isn't dry yet. This way, you can cover the whole of your canvas in colours and textures.

2) Secondly, take a smaller piece of clingfilm, about the size of the area you want covered. Again first scrunch and unscrunch your clingfilm, and then paint directly on it the rough shape of what you want to have (using just one colour or more). Remember that this will be the mirror-image of what ends up on your painting. Then press it onto your canvas, again creating some texture with the clingfilm. You have less control over what happens here, because the paint will either reach the canvas or not, and if you flatten out all the ripples then you might as well have just painted a uniform layer on top. So the end result will be more of a surprise. Leave it to dry for at least an hour, and then pull the clingfilm off (your hands will still be covered in paint after this). This way, you do not paint an entire layer, but you can add some smaller areas of paint. Because of the texture in the clingfilm, you do not get a uniform layer, but in some areas the background colour will come through.

3) Lastly, take a piece of clingfilm that is the size of the area you want covered, which can be your entire canvas. Paint whatever you want to do onto another surface (preferably non-stick), put the scrunched clingfilm on top, press down hard, take it off, flatten it out, and then press it down upon your canvas. You can see the effect here, because you can see which areas will have paint on them an which are just see-through. You can leave it to dry, but you can also take this off quite quickly, because all the paint that was on the clingfilm should be transferred to your canvas anyway (again, you'll get a lot of paint on your hands). This way, you will not see all the paint that was on the original picture, but some scattered elements.

I personally prefer the second method, because I do not have enough patience for the first and the third method uses up a lot of paint that does not end up on your canvas but gets thrown away with the surface it was originally painted on. But it all depends on the effect you're going for!

Hopefully, I'll soon have a painting to show you!

ETA: 21 June 2012: I have now added a fish painting that I made using the second technique.

Paintings

So in one of my first posts I mentioned that I occasionally paint, and I don't think I've ever said anything about that afterwards, apart from the fact that I am often unsure whether a painting is "done" or not. That is, as you will see, one of the main problems I have when painting.
But first, a short history.
My mother took a arts class when I was still very young, and I was very jealous of her, because she could draw an apple and it would look like a real apple, while mine would look like circles coloured in red and yellow with a brown line sticking out. I was never any good at drawing, but I did do it a lot, I even had my own comic book "series" (inspired on the Donald Duck magazine), which involved all the cats in the neighbourhood. This drawing-craze died out when I came into my teens, but when I went away for my studies I took my mother's (who had stopped doing anything years before) big box of painting-things with me and started doing watercolours, mainly because they're cheap (once you have the paint) and easy and it dries fast. I mostly made some fantastical children's-book-illustration-like images, some of which I quite like. I was really never any good, though, and soon I didn't have the time/energy/inspiration anymore (see The Creative Side), so I quit.
And then about a year ago my mother started taking art classes again, and she has become really good. I mean really good. She knows composition, and colours, and she paints a painting that would take you and me days in about 4 hours and then sits back and enjoys it. At first she also did some watercolours, but she quickly moved on to acrylics and oil paint. She does figurative things, and abstract, and blends, and everything! So every time I got home there would be another painting to see and like and discuss, and I got more and more restless again. I wanted to paint too! And in acrylics!
So I bought a lot of paint and some brushes and some cheap canvasses (it always starts with spending loads of money) and started to paint. Now I have always been very figurative in my paintings, I cannot do abstract and much as I love them, I could never do impressionistic paintings because they require you to paint something up close that does not really make sense until you are 3 meters away from it, and I need to see what I am doing. So I painted things. My first paintings were really childlike, looking like neatly coloured-in images, and so far removed from what I wanted it to be that I became frustrated and stopped doing it.

But then one day I was looking at one of the arty cards I got, and I realised I had been doing it all wrong. You see, in watercolours, if you don't want the colours to run into each other, you have to wait for the first layer to dry before you add the second, and you can have colours run into each other, but you can't really mix them, because then you end up with a big brown-greyish mash. But in acrylics, you don't wait for the bottom colours to dry, because then you get those bordered-off areas that seem to float on top of each other but do not relate to each other. You paint the first colour, let it dry a bit, and then you paint the second colour, and it's no problem if they mix a bit, because they will keep their colours or become a nice blend, but they won't turn all greyish. And then I got a big load of very nice small brushes for the Postcrossing-Sinterklaas thing I did, so I could paint smaller things, and then I started painting again.

The first thing I painted you can see to the right (I am putting up quite bad quality photos from weird angles, with flash marks and bits of background showing on purpose, because I have seen stuff stolen on the Internet just a bit too many times. I could scan them and give you a high quality nice image, but I'm not gonna). It is not very happy, clearly, but it kinda looks like I wanted. But it isn't finished. I know it isn't because something is missing, and I think that something is colour, but I'm not sure, it may also be the fact that the statue seems to be floating and the bushes in the background look unrealistic, but I don't know how to fix that. I am really happy with the statue though, and with the tree, so that is good, although I am unsure whether I will ever finish this one. I would need some good advice or tips on how to do that without destroying the things I already have and am proud of, so I may write this off as my first "real acrylics" painting.

And then this morning I painted something else. I wanted to do something colourful, if only to contrast with the sad dreary painting, and something simple with a bird and a tree (birds and trees are my thing, don't ask me why). I painted this in about half an hour, which seems oddly short but felt quite right. The problem is, I don't know if it's finished. As you can see, I didn't paint the tree, which was going to be on the left, running out of frame, and I am not sure whether it needs the tree. I was going to add some blue or purple colour in the bottom, but I'm not sure whether it needs that either. I am really happy with what I have, the bird looks like it is falling over at first, but when you look at it longer you realise it isn't, and the background came out just like I wanted it. But is it finished? I don't know! With the first one I'm sure it isn't finished but I don't know what to add, while with this one I do know what I want to add, but I don't know whether I need to!

Argh, the frustration!

Now I have ruined paintings in the past by doing or adding too much to them (something my mum is also suffering from), so I am just going to leave this one for the time being. It is kinda funny, because my class got cancelled today and I have the whole day to paint, but now I will stop doing it after an hour. That's just the way it goes. Inspiration is a fickle thing.

But if any of you have any good ideas or tips please please leave them in the comments. You don't have to do art or know about art, because neither do I, and really, I could use all the help I need!

The creative side

Right, time to stop meta-posting and start to actually tell you something interesting!
I have some "hobbies", or things that I like to do when I am not doing my "official" thing, which is studying. But I used to have a part-time job next to my studies for the last 3.5 years, which took up about 16-20 hours of my week. During this time, I did very little else (productively speaking) but study and work. I don't want to complain, it is not as if I did not have the time to do anything else (paint, bake, write, blog), but more that my head was so filled up with this 60 hour work week that there simply was not enough space (in my head) to do anything else (apart from reading, interestingly enough, I always have space in my head for reading).
When I came home from selling overpriced sandwiches, the only thing I wanted to do was eat my dinner while watching TV, preferably some stupid semi-reality program which does not require your full attention and makes you feel good about yourself, or some quiz-like program (I loooove University Challenge) where you can shout the answers at the screen and make you feel good about yourself in another way.
However, I quit that job as of December 1st, and now that the very busy month of holidays and birthdays and celebrations is over, I can already start to feel more space inside my head. This blog is an example of that, but there are other things as well; I did some serious painting for the first time in years yesterday, and I am doing some baking again, and I am planning to learn how to knit soon. No writing ambitions as of yet (still busy with essay writing), but I will try to revise my NaNoWriMo 2011 novel and send it around to those who have asked for it (or maybe post it here? Not sure yet!).
The only thing I have been steadily doing for a year now is Postcrossing, where you send a card (a real, physical postcard) to "a random person" (who is still a member of the website, of course) and then receive one from another person. I love doing this, because it shows so many different cultures and customs, because I love writing and reading long messages, and because it shows me, again and again, that humans the world over have the same dreams and wishes and hopes and fears. A man from the United Arab Emirates wrote on his profile "this project shows me that there is still hope in the world, because people can still communicate, even if their leaders cannot", which I think is very true. Not sure if this would count as "creative thing" for everybody, but it does for me.
So that is the way things are standing right now. I know that doing something creative is important to me, and that I should take the time to do it, but it is so frustrating when you cannot give something your full attention and energy that most times you simply just don't do it. I want to stop not doing things. Not because this is a New Year's resolution or because I think it will make me more interesting or "a better person" or whatever, but just because I miss it, and I think I need it.
So hopefully you'll be seeing some paintings, postcards, pictures, or writings appear on this blog very soon! And if you don't, it may even be because I am busy producing those very same things!