Finishing Things
At the Landscape course I did, we were taught to have more than one painting on the go, so you have a number of paintings at various stages of construction. This is very sensible advice for painting with oils, as the paint needs to dry in one layer before you add another. Of course, this does assume that you are painting in layers rather than using a "painting by numbers" technique.
My very first oil painting was a painting by numbers kit of Mary and her little lamb. I think I may still have it somewhere. If you are not acquainted with the idea, painting by numbers is a pre printed outline of an image, like you get in colouring books, with a numeric code for each colour inserted in the relevant place. This means you paint each part of the image separately in one layer
Back to the finishing off point. Not the vanishing point, that's something different entirely. Well, I should not have been encouraged to start so many paintings because with my low boredom threshold and butterfly mind, I ended up with a lot of unfinished work.
But hooray, I have finished two of them. The first is the view over Jedburgh in very thin paint, used like watercolour, with the wood left to show in areas, and the grain exposed. This was done from a photograph, unusual for me, but I had previously sketched the scene in pen and water, so it didn't feel so much like cheating.The second was from an exercise from the course, painting on unusual objects. As a librarian ( my alter ego) I found it hard to paint on a book, but that one was disintegrating anyway. It is a gazetteer of places, basically a list of towns, cities and rivers. It somehow seemed appropriate to paint a landscape on it.
The pop-up windturbines from a page in the book were an obvious addition. I have made pop-up cards for decades. I had the book painted over a year ago, and done a prototype pop-up, but then prevaricated over finishing it off. It seems like my brain had worked out how to do it, and then forgot to tell my hands.
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