Pumpkins, Paintings, and People

It's been a bit of a while since the last update, so here's what I've been working on lately: 

Finished the underpainting and begun "dead coloring" on my Venetian canal painting.  It's based on a photo that I took during a trip to Venice.  I'm taking my time with this one.

© Oscura Photography

It's pumpkin season!  You know what that means.  Baking pumpkins, eating pumpkins, taking pictures of pumpkins and photoshopping them onto my body for ha-has.... I mean... okay, maybe not that last one.

I made this little guy in pretty harvest colors, following a free crochet pattern from Little Muggles.  It was a fun break from drawing, painting, and job searching in my new locale.  

A little drawing of an eye, with an Alda Merini quote.  Mostly I wanted to play with my inks, and mixing colors.  An unlikely combination, mixing a true violet with Antelope Brown yields some very lovely warm tones.  I'm definitely going to use this color combination in some larger projects.  

And, lastly, sketching people at the beach.  They're little because I was spending maybe twenty seconds on each doodle, since the people who go to the beach in 60 degree weather move around a lot more than the typical sunbathers.  Fun stuff!  It's also the same violet ink I used in the eye.  

Teatime Musings

© Chromeheart

I'll let you in on a little secret... half the time when I glue art paper into my sketchbook, it's covering up a drawing or something that I didn't like so much.  Some Italian blackletter that came out wrong is hiding under this one, and nobody would ever know just by looking at it.  Books are for secrets.

Flipping back through this sketchbook, which I started about eighteen months ago, I realize that I haven't been using it right.  After all this time, I'm still trying too hard to be "good."  I still want to go back and cover up everything that didn't come out so well; glue my pages together so nobody can see what's inside and paint over old mistakes until you can't tell what they were.

You can hide your mistakes, but there isn't enough paint in the world to make them go away.