Doing and Not Doing

My sketching continues just fine. I don’t draw every day but I do draw most days. And I even have a Saturday morning routine where I set aside two hours for a leisurely breakfast and plenty of time to draw uninterrupted. That’s going well.

Painting? Well… All my best intentions have fizzled out over the past two months. I need to reconsider what I need to do to get past this, because I really do want to get better at painting. I just need to commit to the time needed and to actually do it.

Part of the problem is that there’s a lot more time required to get set up to paint as well as cleaning up after. Sketching is much more spontaneous, and I can easily deal with interruptions. (Although, truthfully, I tend to arrange things so that I don’t get interrupted very often.) Water color and gouache are much easier to set up and clean up and they’re even easily portable so long as I work on a smaller scale.

What I really want to do is try working in oils, but for various reasons, that just isn’t going to happen right now. And only working with acrylics once a week (at best - I haven’t painted in acrylic at all since early January) isn’t cutting it. I do still have a halfway decent watercolor sketchbook. I think I’ll get my gouache paints out to do small sketches, or even just tiny studies, at least twice a week, with an eye toward working on studies for a larger acrylic painting. Now to just figure out what the best tine to carve out is.