Guess what

I was thinking about art works I wanted to create the other day, and inspiration struck me! (which is a rare occurrence for an artist. How lucky I am)

Painting with oils isn't something I do as often as I should. It's expensive and takes forever to dry, especially the more layers you add. This is unfortunate for me, because oil painting is actually one of my favorite mediums in the world. All the greats used oils after all (not like they had other options, though..). But most of my attention has been on the newest works out there. I won't drop any names, but there are people who do some cool stuff with oil painting! Like literally splatting on oils so the painting becomes almost like a 3D painting. Isn't that cool!

I've mostly seen it on portraits, which is incredible, because it's basically a sculpture. But I was thinking, what if I did the same thing, but I made topographical maps with them. I love landscape paintings, but I rarely do them because they don't follow the same rules that portraits do.

With portraits there are anatomical rules to follow, and you can paint what you see knowing these rules. They help you establish a better understanding of exactly how to make a portrait look realistic. Of course it's a bad habit to have, so I'm going to try and break it using landscape painting. That is a little more abstract than portraits, but at the same time it's not.

It doesn't matter if you don't paint a tree exactly like what it looks like, because it'll still look like a tree. However, if you want to get an accurate painting done, you have to understand that everything has to be perfect for it to mimic reality. Hence, it can be abstract, but at the same time, it must be grounded in reality. That's one of my favorite oxymoron's ever!

I'll come back with updates. Til then, ta ta!