Look in My Studio this Week – It’s Moved!

If you look in my studio this week, you will see most of the work has moved out to the garage. That’s because I’m gearing up for Production Week in the Master Program where you work on 8-10 paintings all at once. I finished up on the painting from last week, “Barrels of Fun,” taking a friend’s suggestion to go ahead and add owls in the painting.

Production Week

The purpose of production week according to the Milan Art Institute is to learn how to create art in a production process like an assembly line. Tasks are batched together so that whatever you do to one painting, you do the same thing to the other paintings at the same time.

I gathered seven canvases I had and one piece of mixed media paper. I covered the table with a tarp and set it up in the garage. Then I used a few smaller table-top easels and French easels I had on hand to try and get a workable area where all eight pieces could be worked at the same time.

My intent is to keep to the process I’ve been using where I start with acrylic washes and spray paint with stencils. Then I sketch out my source photos and start painting with acrylics.

This is the first round with the washes

This is the addition of spray paint with stencils:

This is my hand after spray painting!

Then I got stuck!

In A Funk

I had my weekly coaching call with Milan Art and talked about my feeling stuck with the Production Week process.  My coach suggested I go back to square one and make sure I have the source photos I will be using planned out as well as the approach I would use. I thought I had a pretty good handle on the process I would use but must admit I really didn’t have my source photos lined up.

This feedback left me stymied as I don’t have eight more canvases readily available and I’m feeling under pressure to get through Production Week before we start packing up for our trip North.

A fellow student suggested I pull the canvases I had already prepped into whatever photo editing software I use and develop the sources to keep the canvases. I think I’ll take her advice and see if I can still pull this off next week.

To add to my funk, I had ordered five floater frames from Jerry’s Artarama for the paintings in my “Wine, Women, and Song” series. Unfortunately, they were of such poor quality that they broke apart during the act of just unpacking them. I was hoping to find a reasonable way to frame these larger pieces but will have to look more.

Barrels of Fun Revisited

Last week, I asked for your recommendation of how to add a bird (the “song” piece of the series) to my latest painting “Barrels of Fun.” I had asked whether to just put an owl on a few of the wine parrel faces or to put it on the wine bottle label. A friend of mine suggested I do both, so here is the version with the owls:

Takeaways

Artist’s slumps are normal as part of the creative process, but they aren’t much fun! I probably just need a break and hopefully will find my inspiration again. What do you find helps when you’re in any sort of a slump?