This past week I have been painting every day, layer after layer on the same painting.  It is week six of the Life Book 2015 course and the second Main Lesson with Tamara Laporte, whom I love having the chance to learn from!  I painted and painted, I lost track after the tenth time I found myself applying more layers of colour and bringing up the lines again …. and doodles.  Doodles for Africa my friends.  I am a person who should not be encouraged to doodle.  I don’t have a ‘stop’ button and now I’m rather afraid the painting looks like it has a sudden attack of measles – or a very bad rash!!

This is such a different style for me, though I didn’t stay so much in the abstract side of the venture but wandered into the whimsical as is my wont.  I enjoyed the slow build up of colour, the challenge to place the right amount of dark and light shading and to blend just so……  I don’t think it’s a brilliant balance of colours, [not enough white and neutral spaces] but for a first go it’s okay.  I loved being able to add in and add in and add in – the miniscule details all add up so that wherever the eye wanders there is something to look at, something to notice.  For some of you it may be too much – it is for me – but the exercise was a great one for layering, building up blocks of colour and then somehow uniting them and for playing around with doodles [and for finding out I don’t know when to stop].

Here’s the whole caboodle for your viewing pleasure:

And here a some detail corners – highly magnified so you can see some of the layers and all the mistakes.

Bottom Right

Top right

Left side

I think there are certain little corners of the painting that I quite like.  The colours blend well, the doodles are well balanced – something happened and it came together – but overall I find it a bit too much, what do you REALLY think?

Thanks for coming by today, I love that you did!