Finished my first oil painting commission for a client who wasn’t friend or family! It took 36
Finished my first oil painting commission for a client who wasn’t friend or family! It took 36 hours. I technically had a base image that was a satellite photo of a river, but it looks nothing like the end result – so this is my most original work, in that most of it came out of my head, rather than a single photo or my mental human body generator, which was trained on many real people.Making this was a surprisingly intense process. I don’t think of myself as an abstract painter – I was just going along with what the person who had money and was willing to give it to me wanted (an abstract with blues and greens, a sense of wavy motion). It took months to… undergo whatever internal shift was necessary to get from snapshot 2 to snapshot 3.Painting is always stops stops and starts, but I had a really dramatic stop-start snap when I went from studying other people’s good art with an eye towards analyzing The Principles of Color And Composition to knowing what to do next with my own work. It’s like I was forcing a generator into existence by first telling my brain to make decisions in a really unconstrained, high-dimensionality space, and then giving it training data. I have never been as attentive to “what makes beauty work” as in the months I was painting this. I looked at good paintings, and I’d also stop on walks and take pictures of pavement cracks or translate the colors on clouds with “the perfect amount of contrast” to numbers on a 1-10 brightness & saturation scale.I learned a lot, relatively quickly, and it’s still surprisingly to me. Like feeling a new tooth, but in my brain.I’m going back to representational stuff after this, but I plan on making them a lot like this painting – loud, dense, suffused with these nameless textures. -- source link