Oil Painting
Pastels are an interesting medium, and can be oil, or other binding mediums, hard or soft, chalky or smooth. I've used oil pastels as well as others. Pastel pieces can be called paintings or drawings, both are fine. I've more often heard the finished pieces called paintings and the process called drawing. When I started this oil painting I realized that in spite of creating many oil (and other) pastel paintings in the past, I'd only ever done one actual oil painting before. That was back in high school, enough years ago I don't even admit to having been alive that long! Alla Prima is when you paint an oil painting in a single sitting. Usually people will let the layers dry a bit and build up the layers that way. I want to be doing a daily art piece, not a daily partial piece and only showing a work in progress. Ok, so I really would actually LOVE to do large pieces, work on one a month, and share daily progress, but there are too many animals still left to be painted. I would feel as if I was letting down all the animals I couldn't paint. Also, I have a completely different project I want to do after another year of this.
I decided to do this painting as a sort of test. It is an 8x10" painting, and I think I would rather do 5x7" paintings. I am not set still on what the second phase will look like. I have until the first of the month to decide, but my thoughts are that I do not have enough space (or funding for sure!) to be able to have 365 oil canvases in my house. Because of that, I am leaning toward doing a variety of mediums this second year. My current idea is to do alternating weeks. One week would be oil paintings on M,W,F and then do pastel drawings on T,H, and maybe charcoal drawings on the weekends or once a month even do a ceramic piece. Then the next week I would swap days with the pastels and oils. As I said, I haven't decided for sure yet how it is going to work. I think I will do a pastel next week. I'm not worried about what I'm painting right now, just things I like. This was based off a photo I took of a bald eagle. They aren't endangered now. I did see 2 of them on the way to go get my son from Drum Corp though, and since they won't qualify for being part of the project, I felt I might as well paint it now. I would really like to have done a lot more with this, but it would be something where I'd need to do it over the course of a week or month.
Just wanted to update you, I won't post again until I've done a pastel though. We are getting there, the sticker sample should be here in a few days, and I'm excited about that. Tonight I'm going to be sending some images to a print place I used with my photography and hopefully getting that all figured out too. I'm really quite excited to get this going.
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