LEMONS - Work In Progress/Experiment

Hello lovely people, 

How are you all?

Personally, things are a little chaotic but moving slowly along. 

I am in a research phase at the moment, and I am experimenting with my style and techniques a bit. 

Every so often I hit a hard spot where I compare myself heavily to the artists I admire most, and if I starts lending too much credit to my inner critique, it can slow me down to a bit of a self-confidence crawl. 

So while I am energised to sketch and paint, when it actually comes to it, all my self-doubt comes bearing down and I sort of stand there frozen. 

I am actively working on pushing past it though, and I like to think I have enough experience with this after all these years to move past it at some point. 

In an effort to get the momentum going, I decided to attempt a few paintings as style exercises. The aim with these is to be loose, avoid perfection, and have fun with the process. 

Here's the first one so far, Lemons. 

This concept will look familiar to any of you who might remember my 2017 Inktober series. 

In this test, I tried out laying down my basic values in pencil before starting with the paint.

I feel a strong stylistic draw towards defined shapes and lines, clean volumes and stark value differences, and I want to experiment with those elements somewhat before I jump into my bigger more serious pieces. 

Some of the artists I am inspired by are Wylie Beckert (below left) and Joao Ruas (below right). 

Their work is more muted than what I would like my work to be, but there is something about their use of values, lines and volumes that speaks to me on a very deep level.
Their style is the type of visual language that wakes something in me. 

They are leagues ahead of me in every way but their work really inspires me and gives me energy to keep pushing to reach a style that excites me as much as their work does. 

I had a lot of fun working with the fabrics in this small piece, as I don't often draw or paint clothes, as you well know. I suspect I will include elements such a drapes and capes more often as I go as I find myself enjoying painting them. I am exploring ways to include them in my work without it taking away from the sort of blank slate I like my characters to be. 

Adding colour was tricky, and was where I started to feel less comfortable and satisfied with the process, which is almost always the case.
I am definitely more at ease with muted colours, as is evident in my fav artist picks anyways. 

Somehow, I still don't want my work to be colourless. I do enjoy some elements of colour in my pieces, and I want to find a way to weave them into my work. 

This will require a certain degree of experimentation I suspect though! 

I am not entirely done with this painting, I would like to experiment with the lemon tree itself, as I kept it quite flat so far. 

But I don't want to risk completely ruin what I have done so far, so I scanned the piece and printed it out on watercolour paper, and I will do some more experiments on those iterations. 

I printed out one colour version and one black and white version, which will allow me to try different things out. 

This idea will probably turn into a painting some day, as you may have noticed my infatuation with trees coming out of people's head, so there is no doubt I will actually explore this as a full painting some day, but for now, it is serving me well as a test subject. 

This is of this post for now, but I'm sure I'll have updates on this piece soon, and I will also have more experiments and sketches to share soon!

In the meantime, I hope you are all doing well :)

Thank you for reading this,
Take good care all!
Love, M

PS : Please enjoy this reference image of me feeling regal in a duvet cover.