This series is slowly coming together .I’m working on about 14 paintings together . Some big , some small. Some weeks it feels like one step forward and 2 steps back. Yesterday felt like forward  and it was a great feeling. What keeps painting interesting is not knowing what’s going to happen or exactly what it’ll look like in the end.

I thought I’d share what these pantings looked like when I started at the end of last year- before we’d even heard of things like lockdown and homeschooling and Zoom. I ended up putting them to one side for a while because I wasn’t feeling the same as when I started.

I’ve noticed that I can’t paint if I’m in a grumpy or sad mood. My paintings come from a cheerful positive and optimistic place where I have time ahead of me and some music on, or maybe silence except the sounds of the birds outside my window. When I look at these paintings I feel good remembering my time creating them

This week I’m focussing on these big paintings and am at the stage where I’m refining and making decisions about what I want to keep . Sometimes my paintings can contain too much and become busy as I add shapes and lines . I have to take some time to look , consider my next moves , check my notes , without getting carried away. I’m getting better at this and have less of the fear that I’ll ruin what I have because I know more from experience that I’ll be able to fix it.

In this painting I added thin layers of acrylic thinned with medium and water over thicker built up paint . Sometimes I get a favourite bit that I don’t want to paint over and I know I have to fight that and remember to stand back and look at the painting as a whole .

During the painting process things happen by chance, like the tiny line or red that got picked up in the brush as I painted a brushstroke of lighter green. It immediately livened up the whole canvas so I knew I wanted to keep it there. We’ll see what happens with the rest of the painting.