oil painting – Harley Makes Art

More than painting this week, I’ve been marketing and trying to force myself to make scary phone calls.

I’m still getting trapped in my head a lot. Once you become your own boss, you have to learn how to keep yourself on track without the threat of being fired. As a reminder to stay positive, though, I’m focused on art for more hours of the week than ever before. I have faith that I will meet my time goals, pretty soon.

So here’s some of what I’ve been up to.

The flowers are beginning to come to life.

I’ll start with the newest thing, actually, because I’m most excited about it. The flowers are starting to come along and the background just feels really happy to me. I’m going to work on my face a bit more too, some finishing details. This should only take a few more hours. Working bigger is worth the results and the patience!

I love that oil paint doesn’t dry fast, so you can mix all the colors on the palette and not worry about them drying before you get them on your brush.

Just started a new palette. These are the colors for some of the flowers, which is mainly what I worked on today. I’ll fill up the rest of this in a couple days.

I want to show you the process for a cartoon-y, illustration-y piece I’m working on too, so here:

I started with a sketch that I then transferred onto a canvas I painted black. I then started by shading using white, so that I can pile other colors on top. It acts as a guide. The face turned out different. I actually like the face in the original sketch better, so I’m going to to save that sketch in case I want to turn it into digital art later on.

Then comes the messy stage. There’s always a stage where the piece looks sub par, but it’s a work in progress! This is where I mix the colors with enough water to make them transparent and start packing them on there.

Packing in more color…

Now the piece is coming along. I added lines with a sharpie, I’m not sure how I feel about it. I do think the piece looks better with lines, although I need to go back over some of them with paint to smooth them out. I’ll adjust the colors and the value of those colors… Basically, there’s still several things to do but this is where it starts to look good. This is also as far as I’ve gotten with it.

Now onto marketing stuff…

A couple days ago, I went to a bar called “The Avenue” where everyone I know seems to go. They have live music, art, and drinks so strong you’ll black out after just three of them… Anyway, they let me leave business cards there as well as free samples… I set up some of my art while I sat at a table to draw. I’ve read that doing this in cafes and such is a good strategy and I got their permission to do it. I hope to find other places to do this.

Finally, I got some professional business cards made, as well as coupons that I will hand out. I have both a family reunion and a class reunion tomorrow, so it should be a good opportunity for that. All I need to do is get over my shyness and talk to people.

I will be posting that coupon online as well!

So I guess that’s it. I plan to update more often, maybe with shorter updates. I need to build a larger audience, but I suppose that will come with time. Anyway, thanks for reading!

So I have a confession: I haven’t been painting very long. Most of my experience is in drawing with graphite and colored pencil. I’ve been painting for maybe a year and a half and I’ve taken a couple painting classes. What this means, ultimately, is that it still takes me a long time to finish a piece because I don’t always know what I’m doing.

And that’s ok. It all comes with time. I’m already good for my current level of experience, with time it will turn into great.

Anyway, let’s start with one of my first pieces. When I say “first”, I mean paintings I’ve started since I moved my studio about a year ago.

I’m calling this one “The Closet”. I’ll let you figure out the rest.

This is the 2nd painting I started since getting serious about painting. It still needs work, more detail on the moon… Honestly, I’m trying to adopt a “just get it done” mentality to combat my perfectionism. Perhaps it’s not my greatest painting, but it’s still good, and since I’ve been working on it so long, I just want to get it finished. As I said in my last post, oil paintings take a long time to dry. After this layer dries, I just need a few more details.

This is actually a friend of mine. We used to work together in a dispensary.

This painting? I keep wanting to call it finished… The only thing it still needs is perhaps some detail on the weed plants. The most challenging thing for me right now is smooth lines. It’s getting the right combination of pigment and linseed oil in order to form something solid. If anything, I might want to add a few details but it is pretty much done.

This is a lot more vibrant than most of my work, which shows how happy I was painting for an audience.

This is a painting I started at the Ganja Goddess Convention. It has a long way to go. The flowers are based from real life rather than a photo, but of course I just started them. I used acrylic paint for the first and second layer, now I’m using oil on top.

When you start learning the human figure, you draw people nude. I continued to draw women as I questioned my sexuality and strived to be thin.

This is the 1st painting I started since my new studio, so I’m definitely ready to call it done! I added more color to the hair because something felt lacking. I lightened up the background… I’m deciding whether I’m satisfied with it, I think I might be. As I said, I need to have the mentality of just getting it done… That one breast is larger than the other, I’ve noticed, but that’s realistic, honestly. Nobody’s body is perfectly symmetrical.

I keep changing the background, I’m actually starting to like it. The left boob has issues.

This one has a ways to go… It’s drawn and painted from real life. The reason it isn’t as realistic as, say, my Buddha painting, which I should probably also show you… Is that I started drawing it in one lighting, but then I’m using slightly different lighting to paint it, as well as a different mirror. Therefore, it’s not gonna be super realistic, a lot of it has to come from my head. That means it’s gonna be more cartoon-y. That’s ok though! Lesson learned, and I get practice with improvising.

This is my newest painting. It is so much easier to get in detail and it pops out so much more when you work bigger, so I want to do that as much as I can now. Maybe it’s easier but it also allows for expansion. I’ve realized my favorite artists do such amazing work because they work big!

Anyway, I had to adjust the nose, I realized the proportions were a little off… I’m debating whether to keep those large circles under my eyes because it certainly says something about me… I know it looks good, but it’s gonna look even better once I get all the detail in there. It needs to dry though first before the next layer… I’m still not sure what to put in the background.

I’d like to start posting these blog posts earlier in the day for a wider audience, but, you know. I’m a night owl so for now this works… Anyway, thanks for reading… I’ll just show you the Buddha painting tomorrow… The next couple of days will be art days, too, so you’ll be seeing more soon!

Tag: oil painting

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