Happy Thanksgiving! I decided I needed to quit being lazy and get a holiday-ish painting done this week. And since I need the practice, I also tried to make it another alla prima painting. For my second attempt, I chose a similar but slightly more complicated pumpkin subject. I’m really happy with how it eventually came out, but the colors definitely took a muddy turn and I had to do a second coat. It doesn’t help that I really haven’t been painting very much in the last couple weeks so I’m a little off my game.

I had all of the same issues this time as I did last time with my colors just not popping like I wanted and I ended up doing a second layer again. I know it’s the black gesso killing my colors, but I wanted to maintain some consistency with this mini pumpkin series so I used black again anyway.

One of these days, I’d really like to finish a legit alla prima painting since it’s something I really struggle to pull off. I have another plan to do a 30 in 30 challenge so I’m trying to practice a little first. Is it cheating to practice? I have a few more black canvases to torture.

 

 

As I mentioned above, I’m going to give the 30 in 30 challenge another go in January. To commit myself I bought a large stack of 6×6 gessoboards but I’m definitely having my doubts about it. I’m a bit of a perfectionist (my last 30 in 30 took 36 weeks to finish) and I don’t know if I can handle leaving unsuccessful paintings alone. I’ll probably go back a “fix” each one as I go along which isn’t really what the challenge is about. I think I might stipulate to myself that I have to paint from life so fixing will be more difficult if I have to set up the still life again.

 

 

I’ve been wracking my brain for subject matter to paint for this series. I don’t want to do food for obvious reasons and I’m having trouble deciding on a general theme. I would like to maintain one general theme to tie all of the paintings together since I like collections of paintings. My ideas so far are: art supplies, camera equipment, kitchen stuff, toys, and tools. Out of those, I have the most ideas around kitchen stuff. But we’ll see. A lot can change between now and then.