Back to the Easel

There are many talented artists out there who are productive enough to have blogs titled "Daily Paintings" or "A Painting A Day". Some seem to produce enough to have a blog called "A Painting Every Five Minutes". Given what's been going on around here lately, this blog should be titled "A Painting in between Fixing The Leaky Pipe in the Basement, Cleaning Out the Closets, Removing the Remains of the Tomato Plants That Didn't Do Well This Year, and Tending to A Sick Dog" blog, although I don't thing that would fit in the title bar. Now that the To-Do list has been mostly To-Done for now, I'm sitting myself down at the easel and kicking myself squarely in the behind (not a physically easy thing to do) so I get some painting done.

First thing is my latest entry into the Different Strokes From Different Folks blog challenge. This time the challenge was a photo taken of the rooftops in San Francisco. I have to admit, I would probably never have taken the photo in the first place, and even if I did, I would not have looked at it as something interesting to paint. That's part of what makes these challenges so fun and interesting; they make you see things with different eyes, and take you out of your comfort zone.

"Up On The Roof"
(not an original or imaginitive title, but it fits,
and my mind refuses to think of another)
8 X 10
Acrylic on Canson paper

Because the subject matter basically boils down to abstract shapes, it became more of an exercise in color experimentation. I like violet as a shadow color, but I'm not sure it works here. It may have worked better if the color in the far buildings were more saturated. Right now this piece seems to be suffering from a split personality; intense color up front, dull color in the back. They say an artist has to paint three hundred paintings before they even start to grasp all the intricacies of what they are doing. Woo-hoo, only about two hundred ninety five to go!

My Muse is prepping the next canvas. To productivity, and beyond!