When someone stumbles upon my little blog I'm not sure what they think of my jumping from medium to medium and style to style. They probably think "wow, this girl is all over the place with her art/design/packaging"...and they would be completely right. I am an extremely compulsive personality and my art and design work is not exempt from this side of me. In fact, if I didn't have my artwork as an outlet for all the crazy, bipolar creative energy that I have I would probably drive myself and everyone around me completely insane.
My latest obsession has been learning how to oil paint. I had used oil paint a few times when I was younger and HATED it. Up until then I had been very happy painting with acrylic which was easy to clean (which is great for someone as messy as I am when painting) and dried quickly to help with coating and layering. Oil paint was insanely hard to clean off, the smell of turpentine made me gag and to top it off everything blended together! So that perfect color that I mixed suddenly got completely destroyed by the other colors around it. Can we all say "UGH!"
Once the idea recently came into my head that I wanted to give oil paints another try I could not be happy until I had gone to Michaels and purchased new brushes, ODORLESS turpentine (whew) and a set of oil paints.
And you know what? Oil painting is fun!
It is still ridiculously messy (I will be scraping paint from my fingernails for weeks to come), but the finished product is totally worth it. On the right subject the color blending becomes something truly beautiful, and the paint always seems to glisten like I just finished painting it a minute ago.
So above you see my first successful oil paint still life. I hope you enjoy it and I hope this post makes you go out and try something new!
