"Slumber" Work In Progress

The new underdrawing

Hi everyone, 

Those of you who are on Insta or Lens will have seen bits of this already, but here's a big post to show you what's been happening with this painting so far. 

This painting will be titled "Slumber", and I want it to have fairly muted tones, and to be lighter at the bottom, and get darker towards the top.
I am undecided as to the amount of detail I want to add to the trees, but it is likely I will add certain elements, such as perhaps some bird, leaves, and maybe some thread. We'll see. 

I had planned for this painting to be an acrylic piece.
I recently bought some Liquitex acrylic paints and have been wanting to experiment with them and this painting felt like a good opportunity.
Unfortunately, I was quite affected by my stress and fear of the medium, which lead me to be a lot stiffer than would have been ideal.
Whenever I feel particularly uneasy and stressed about a piece or some part of the process, I end up not listening to my instincts and overthinking and overworking the painting.
There is always a point during a painting in progress when I start feeling very frustrated and unhappy, but I know from experience that it is just a stage I have to go through and it will usually pass if I keep at it for a time.
However, in this case, it just got worse and worse. To the point where working on the painting was not enjoyable anymore.
I kept reworking the same areas, never feeling any better, and never getting to a point where I was starting to get a better idea of what I should do or even what I wanted out of the process. 

In these cases, it is better to let go and start again.
Which is exactly what I have done. 

I decided to stop persisting and printed out the sketch I had scanned, and then transferred it to a new piece of paper using carbon paper. 

One of the issues I think I was having, was that I was working too thickly with my medium.
I purposely bought fluid body acrylic paints (a type of acrylic paints that are quite soft and fluid and can be easily used in washes, similarly to watercolour, as opposed to the more common type of acrylics, heavy body acrylics, that are thicker and lend themselves well to working opaquely and thickly) because I want to paint with acrylics in a similar way I paint with watercolours, that is to say, in layered washes. But I want to see how the fact that acrylics don't reactivate, affects my style and techniques. 

However, because I am not used to acrylics and because the only experience I have ever had with them was when I was in school over 10 years ago, I was stiff, stressed, and scared of the medium, which led to me being that way in my painting  techniques too. 

Instead of really taking the time to think about the medium and how I wanted to use it, and instead of looking at the piece and analysing what I wanted it to look like, I gave in to my fear of the medium, and avoided making precise decisions.
I think I got a little lazy because it is fairly easy to correct mistakes (if working opaquely) and update a painting with acrylic, since it layers without reactivating.
Whereas with gouache and watercolour I have to plan my strokes more carefully so as not to ruin the previous layers and blur and muddy everything, with acrylic there is a bigger margin of error and more freedom when it comes to repainting or painting over some details. I may have leaned intro that a little too much, and thought I could get away with more than I actually could. 

This is good. It is teaching me the limits of my mediums, and also to not be lazy and actually think ahead of time and have at least a basic strategy for the painting. 

I am going to go into the new one with a more precise idea of what I want and do not want, and we'll see where that goes.  

The "failed" painting

Some of progress shots. I was working too thickly and was layering too much.

I think that another reason I was having trouble using the acrylic in the way I wanted is that I used the wrong painting surface.
I decided to try painting on a piece of matting board I have a pile of, and, as wonderfully thick as that board is, is it not made to be worked on in washes (or worked on at all for that matter). It was fine at withstanding thick acrylic layers with little water, but broke down as soon as I tried applying any significant amount of water to it. 

Therefore, I made the decision to switch to proper watercolour paper, and transferred my new sketch to a piece of 638gsm (300lb) Arches Hot Press watercolour paper.
I am hoping that that will help with my wanting to use acrylic in washes. I'll keep you updated. 

Once I decided I was going to do it all again, I took the opportunity to change some details about the piece, namely the hands of the character.
I disliked the position of its left hand (the one on the right), so I changed it to something that made it look less like a block, and more like...well, a hand.
We all know how much I like drawing expressive fingers, and the previous position didn't allow me to indulge in that, so I changed it. :D

I also changed the expression of the character, just to see what I preferred, but that is one of those details that will probably evolved as I paint and nothing is set in stone for it.

So there you have it :
My two mains issues with this painting so far were that
-  I was working too thickly with the medium because I didn't have a proper plan and was scared, so I thought I could keep layering until I got what I wanted, when in fact, that wasn't a good way to work.
- And I was using the wrong surface for the actual way I wanted to paint, that is lightly in washes. 

All in all, as much as I loathe feeling like I wasted time, I didn't really waste the time when I truly think about it, and I basically had a practice run for the piece.
I might even continue painting on the old piece and use it as a sort of colour test, to try out colour combinations and details I am thinking about. 

I have been filming the entire process, so I'll be able to show you a timelapse of the failed version once I put together the Process Video.
I'll also be able to show the transfer process. 

I hope you enjoyed this peak into my process and I hope I will have a painting to show you soon. 

Take care peeps,
Speak soon! <3