Day 14: Season 2, Episode 3 Ebony Sea
For New Year’s Eve, I decided to have a cozy night in and paint with Bob. I spent 3+ hours getting this one together and I think I keep finding myself walking the line of following along too closely with Bob’s techniques and what my own creativity wants to do. When I started to feel like the painting was going against my own instincts, I would pause the video and just go freestyle on it. I have a tug of war going on in my head. One side says, “You gotta follow the technique! You need to learn something new here!” and then I have the other side of my head saying “Let yourself do what you want in this painting, be freeeeee!” When I start to feel frustrated, most of the time it’s because these two parts of me are arguing while I’m painting. I’ve got The Critic and The Artist hitting each other on the heads. I finally just stopped the video all together and followed my gut with the rest of it. I really wanted the painting to be framed by these two pops of orange and yellows with the tress, leading the eye into the seascape. Once again, I’m not thrilled with the clouds but I’ve learned to just step away instead of constantly trying to tweak things. When I started to listen to ‘The Artist’ more and silenced ‘The Critic’ in my head, I ended up really loving where this landed.
