100-day project - episod 4

 Days 029 to 039

Fiou! I'm back again on this blog. A lot happened since I've last written here. This blogpost will be a short one, just to keep you updated with the 100-day project. To be honest, I have not done anything from this project in the last month. I have been travelling for work, and I have also done by first and bigger acrylic canvas ever (I will soon upload it to my portfolio section). I realized when I came back home that I had completely forgot to write about the last 10 days of the project... So here is a short recap!

Back to seascapes

After completing the trees sketchbook I was a little bit drained. I find trees super interesting, but I think the poor quality of the paper on the sketchbook and my struggle on trees made it less enjoyable than I had planned... Anyway, after a short break, I came back to painting with some planning on my next seascape piece. It was quite fun to choose the color palette (with lots of yellows and purples) and work on the format. I already had the composition from sketches I had done earlier in the project. I spent two days (not full days) working on that. 

Sketching out and figuring out the colors

My initial plan was to paint it on two square acrylic canvases, and have a continuity between the two canvases, but also some contrast (warm at the bottom vs top - dominant of yellows vs purples etc.). I still want to do that (I have even sketched it out on my canvases), but realized that I did not have the right colors to do it properly (I think it is OK now, even though I am not sure the colors will be exactly what I want to archieve the result...). Soooo... I decided to start with watercolors instead :) 

I have spent 3 days on this watercolor :)

Taking some Skillshare classes

One of the main goal of the 100-day project for me was to take time for learning. I have actually started to do it even outside the goals I had for the project (so that's good news). But for the project, I wanted to focus a bit on the sky and the clouds, and also to refresh my knowledge of watercolor portraits (and portraits in general). I have taken a Skillshare class from Sarah Burns for the clouds, and one from Jane-Beata for monochromatic watercolor portraits.

Testing a few techniques to paint clouds

Other things

In between these two main focuses of days 029 to 039, I also took 4 days for other stuff. I tried out some new oil pastels I had by drawing again the last seascape (the one with the path leading to the water). It was quite nice, but I thing I went too big and did not dare to use as much oil pastel as I needed! I have also tried to paint a waterfall with acrylics. My first acrylic paint (it was a skillshare class) was about painting a waterfall. This new attempt did not turn out as expected... but it's OK! I think I need to think more about the shapes of the rocks, to better understand where the water is flowing. With gouache I can go more unprepared, but with acrylics I feel like I need more preparation work and sketches as it does not flow as naturally for me. And finally, I have started to prepare for my next subject in the Seascapes series, with some preliminary sketches. The color palette was really fun for this one, though I have no idea how to render the landscape with other medium! But that's a problem for another day.

Waterfall in acrylics... a bit of a struggle!

Learnings

It's been a while since I have tackled anything on my 100-day project list now. For a while, I found it overwhelming (the list is quite long, and I wanted to document each part of the project through the blog, and videos, etc.) and needed to go back to some "comfort art", or just following my guts in painting other things. I still think it helps me, in the sense that when I am not feeling creative, I can come back to this list of very basic steps leading me to nice projects. I will definitely continue working on this project, but maybe stretch it to a year project or something, and not being so strict on sharing what I am doing! My creative juices are up right now, so I just take advantage of that to do lots of personal art things. Also, nice weather is back, with tons of opportunities for plein-air painting ;)

I have updated the 100-day project portfolio, so you can find all pictures of the art I have done from day 029 to 039 there.