In an earlier post I talked about my first landscape painting and a particularly challenging assignment that my professor would task us with at the beginning of each semester, which led me to discover a new way to paint. Instead of using areas of thick paint, like I'd done with some landscape & outdoor scenes, I layered lots of thin layers on top of each other, giving the painting a glowy effect. I decided to try out this new application to a landscape painting, thus beginning my "new era," so to speak, of landscapes.
Scrolling all the way back through my photos made me laugh a little, because I found the original picture of this painting in the first hundreds of my 10,000 photos of my camera roll. What seems like a lifetime ago was actually less than three years ago. Three years. It's so easy for me to feel like I have been doing this forever, and that I haven't done enough, or haven't grown big enough or had enough success, but seeing the time stamp on that photo of the first landscape gave me some perspective. It showed me that I have grown, and I have been successful, and I've only been seriously painting barely three years, and part of that time I was still in school.
Part of my painting process is starting with really bright colors in the first layers, and then painting over them with softer, lighter layers. Because oil paint is more transparent than other paints, the vibrancy of the first layers shine through, ever so subtly, in the finished painting.
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