Light through paint

The photo at the top of the set can be purchased from RedBubble here.

While the family was away, I worked on doing some painting. There's something about painting that I really can't do if people are around. I need absolutely no distractions, other than the ones I provide myself with (music mostly), or I'll give up and not do any work on it. Or won't even make a start.

That said, there are a lot of arty kind of things I do that I'm not all that keen on having people around while doing them - photography's one. Which means I'll never be a portrait photographer. Tragedy. But no, I jest - it's hardly a tragedy when I have no interest in photographing people.

Painting is both relaxing and irritating. I like the feeling of being absorbed in the effort and losing hours in making something. But at the same time, if it doesn't look great, then I'm irritated. Or if it takes a long time it can become frustrating. I'm mainly working on a painting based around a photograph I took when leaving New Zealand earlier this year. It's fiddly, there's lots of blending work, all of these little detailed bits, I worry that when it comes to adding in the clouds I'll muck it up and have lost hours on end of work.

But so far, it's something I'm really proud of. It's the toughest painting task I've ever set myself and it's taken about 15 hours so far, although it looks like it shouldn't have for what's actually on the canvas. I'd thought before I started working on it that it'd be another matter of slapping the paint on and it'd be done in about eight hours (my usual time to paint something on that size of canvas). Instead, tiny sections of mountains have been painstaking two-hours-at-a-time processes. The photo below is some of what's been done so far. And yes, those scribbly lines on it are more mountains to paint. Oh joy!