07 July 2021

At Last I Try To Tackle The Elephant

3961

Over a year and a half before this, I was working through a book called Learn to Paint in Acrylics With 50 Small Paintings. I got up to number 46, a painting of an elephant that explores contour painting techniques. And it was at that point that, for some reason, even though I had absorbed many of the techniques well, or so I had thought, I ran into the wall I ran into so very many times.

It's not a wall so much as a fog that pushes back. I can spend time dissecting it but knowing what stopped me wouldn't have done much more than given me labels for it all. If you're trying to reinvent yourself as an artist, you know what I'm talking about without another word and I can't find one anyway.

So it all sat there on my drawing board for more than a year, waiting for me to get back to it, while I did PBNs, wasted time off a dwindling life span (statistics being what they are) and letting my social media addiction get the best of me. Not that different from the billions of self-made aspiring artists in the virtual world, really.

I thought about the idea of shortcuts and assists, then. It occurred to me one of the things I didn't like about that first attempt at this was I couldn't sketch out the shape in yellow ochre and feel confident about it; the harder I tried, the sourer it felt. This, I theorize, is what pushed me off the track and landed me straight in the mud. And all the inertia and ennui followed.

It occurred to me that I didn't have to be flawless about my sketching to start and further, I already knew techniques that would allow me to transfer a reference to the media. It was so simple! It just involved, in this case, printing a copy of a scan from the page, coating the back of it with soft graphite (4B Prismacolor Monolith, for what that's worth) laying the print on my media (still the eight-by-eight canvasboard) and rubbing.

A bone folder from my GD days did the burnishing duty. This is what I have: