Hare Timing

Yesterday I tried setting a timer, and using that to keep me focused on making art and not getting distracted, and it did work, but if I’m being honest with myself, yesterday there was still a lot of faffing.

Today I set my timer for one hour, plus five minutes to give myself time to gather supplies. Thirteen minutes later I was still faffing, under the guise of being creative. I had to laugh, and that was actually the point at which I was more honest with myself about the two hours yesterday.

In fairness, yesterday included collage fodder gathering, which is incredibly fafftastic, is being creative, but kind of masked how much time I wasn’t painting. Today was about painting tho, and self-observation.

So, I reset the timer to an hour, with no free faffing minutes, and got stuck in. I like it. It worked. I got waaaay into the zone.

I had set up a table easel with an A3 piece of cartridge paper that I had previously prepped with gesso, and painted again from my hare sketch that I am working with just now.

I started with some caput mortuum thinned with medium, and my favourite Shitty Brushes, and got a rough shape in. Then I chose a limited palette to work with, and started with some colour. At first I was just intuitively putting colour here and there, playing, and having fun.

I needed a bit of emphasis on the darkest darks, and I used a Stabilo All to get some contrast, and then I sprayed that with water, which is one of my favourite techniques when I am painting faces.

Now, here I was challenged because that needs to run and drip and spread and dry, and I was only twenty eight minutes into my hour. The opportunity to hare off into some other realm and lose the focus was huge.

I am not sorry for “hare off”, that is all. 😀

I grabbed my sketchbook and my value finder (red perspex) and started playing with the colours on my palette. I could have taken this exercise to much greater lengths, but I was limited by the time it took my painting to dry off.

Here’s the page from my sketchbook with and without the value finder, to give you an idea of what I was experimenting with.

Once the paper was dry, I got back into painting, playing with the value finder, and paint, and worrying more about the values than the colours. You don’t choose turquoise to paint a hare if you are worried about realistic colours.

When the timer went off I was so happy with myself. I’ve got so many ideas of where to go next with this hare, and also with this timer idea.

Til the morn,

Suzanne

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