I may not be the best, but I’m having fun painting!  We were instructed to do an impression portrait today, which I’ve never done before, and I cheated some.  The biggest difference to achieve impressionism is to dab your brush on, not pull it or scrub it to move the paint around.  I did about half and half.  Many times through the process I wanted to throw her away, telling myself I suck and who do I think I am trying to be an artist?  In order to get the end result, many ugly layers must go down first, to build up color and depth to make it interesting.  If we just painted one flat color (like the color of flesh) it would not be interesting and would have no shadows or light.

Kind of like life, I guess.  All of our shadows and all of our light make our beautiful selves.  Often the most interesting people are full of adventure and bumps in the road – interesting in life and art.

I started out with a simple contour drawing – a clean slate, new to life.  Next I built up the dark areas to create shadows – the bumps and bruises along the path of life.  Then came the the light, though by no means pretty sitting right on top of the darkness.  Yeah, at this point I wanted to cry and forget about the whole thing.  How could these two worlds of shadow and light make anything pretty?  It’s when you start adding even greater light (white) to keep pulling out those highlights and blending with the dark areas.  We don’t want to cover up the dark, because we need it as a part of us forever, to make our light noticeable and brighter.  Even after, we still have to go back in and shade the areas that have become too washed out.

It’s a constant process of making sure our shadows aren’t too heavy to let any light shine, but also to make sure that we don’t completely cover up our shadows with light, because we need opposition in all things to appreciate beauty.

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