Art Journal Painting From This Week

I recently talked about trying out oil pastels over acrylics. Love it. I’ve been experimenting more and in this first picture I have used… acrylics, oil pastels, water color, more oil pastels. In that order

© 2009 Christy Sobolewski (Gulfsprite.com)

This was a total blast and I am proud that my palm tree actually looks like one. Believe me I have painted a lot of palm trees but you don’t see them here because when I show them to my many ‘advisers’ they always frown or even outright laugh. But this palm tree gave all of us (me and my advisers) renewed faith.

Next up is a page that I originally intended to leave as is (it had a cute picture of a mom and child) but in the end I had to ‘complete’ the journal. I went back and revised the angel that was painted on the left and painted the right-hand page.

© 2009 Christy Sobolewski (Gulfsprite.com)

The angel was one of the first paintings I did when taking Jane’s face painting class.

© 2009 Christy Sobolewski (Gulfsprite.com)

You can see from the image above and what is below that I have really learned a lot since. And it hasn’t really been that long, maybe about 3 months or so.

I think I made a ‘leap’ from there to here but it took all of that in-between time for the leap to occur. Take a look and let me know what you think.

© 2009 Christy Sobolewski (Gulfsprite.com)

This is about the same distance and the figure takes up about the same amount of space on the page.

I think there is a huge difference in my skills between the two.

This shot is about 2 feet or so away. One of the problems I have had is working too close and not stepping away from the painting enough. So at a close distance it looks pleasing to the eye but from a larger distance it became discordant and a little ugly IMO.

This photo is about 5 feet from the journal cover:

© 2009 Christy Sobolewski (Gulfsprite.com)

You can see that it is all still attractive and the face has not become strange blobs of color.

And it is just as lovely up close, again, IMO:

© 2009 Christy Sobolewski (Gulfsprite.com)

One of my advisers has been adamant that my faces are not happy enough. That they all have slightly frowning mouths and look sad or angry, or some emotion that doesn’t portray happy. Heh, maybe I am just an angry painter! I think this girl is at least slightly happy. Next I will try an actual smiling mouth.

I also have another Apocolypse painting in the works. Maybe it will be finished tomorrow. You never know how long a particular painting will take. You can try to plan, gauge how long other paintings that are similar in topic and size take. But in the end each painting has a life-cycle of it’s own and I can not entirely predict it.