I was needing to bend and receive a little push with my art, after the summer fires and evacuation, interrupting my daily work routine as I got ready for my upcoming art show. That was only in four and a half weeks from the date the fire started. I mean, face it, I get up and go to work just like most folks, but that my office is where ever I choose to paint, which I do dutifully everyday for about 6-8 hours, no matter what. But with being packed up and ready to evacuate at any given minute you just can’t keep working on most things. So, I moved in temporarily with my daughter and her husband who had just given birth to my most recent grandson. So I fell into helping them, little sleep, and lots of cooing and aweeeeee-ing isn’t he just the best. But for me, not being able to really spread out, and set up an entire studio, while there I had the additional stress of having to keep getting ready to hang my art show, and that was taking a silent toll on me.
Once the show was over and taken down, and all that did not sell inventoried and put away, I felt like heck, very disjointed as I could not move back yet. Not only that, I was pretty much just not in the mood to paint at all. I was ready for a vacation with no one but me pushing my schedule at all! I really wanted to take the time and go camping and fishing for about two weeks away from it all. Well – nope I didn’t even get motivated enough to do that.
I knew tho, I had to get going again, and soon, so as I tried to doodle, I remembered that in the SPIN network of artists, one artist had put together a group to paint Mantangles. Wow, this may be just what I needed, and I could stray away form just painting in a rectangle. I decided to participate in the most recent challenge for the group on Facebook, and joined the Mantangle group of painters, accepting the newest Challenge.
The July and August Challenge details were that the main design was to be circular with a colored background. So I doodled and doodled. I wanted to incorporate an elephant some how. This was the only concept or idea my brain had come up with in two months. So I went further with it. This is my resulting drawing with the resist in place.
Along with the circular pattern, there were the main components to the challenge, we could be working with the primary colors, ie. magenta (fuchsia), yellow and cyan (not the traditional red, yellow and blue).
The mantangle itself was to have been created only using 2 primaries. A background needed to be painted with the 3rd one. It did not matter which order we chose to paint in, but we had to stay with this guideline.
In other words, we couldn’t combine any of the primaries, so if the mantangle was to be painted with magenta and yellow, there couldn’t be any oranges of any description. Likewise if it’s cyan and yellow, there couldn’t be greens and limes. (The colors that would result if any of the dyes were actually blended or mixed.)
I chose to use the cyan as my primary color for the elephant and any shading that needed to be done, and diluting each color down into three shades, light, medium, dark.
Once I got that decided, I could start painting.
I finally settled into the fact that I was painting again. Then I had to move home which lasted for less than a week, as I moved back to town again to house sit for some family while they went away or a week or so. Well, that meant I had to finish the painting there, and time to be done was fast approaching.
By the time I started a second color I realized I was locked into the magenta as the background color and not the yellow as I had planned..
So then I stopped the magenta and finished the yellow as planned on the rest of the interior.
Knowing that the background was going to be done outside the circle I wanted to make the inner background a lighter color and continued on with it until finished.
The end result was this finished little piece. I was very glad I took on the challenge and the doodle itself was indeed challenging. However, I realized I needed to change the design some what as there were only two main colors that could be used inside the enlightened circle.
Knowing that, I re worked the design and made it much simpler. Next time I will know not to be so elaborate – but more structured. But I needed to be out of my box, pushed into something that I could draw and paint with, and still be challenged. At the end of the day, that happened. I am glad to have done this one.
What have you been working on recently? Stretching your mind is sometimes the hardest thing to take on, but can be done pretty easily in many different ways, and they are not always hard, or dangerous to life or limb.
See you along the river of colors on my pallet soon!
Andy.
