Painting is a daily meditation for me | Andrea de Michaelis – Creating my own reality, one thought at a time

The festival of painting continues! I painted until 3:00am yesterday morning, then 8am-ish made coffee for the man. We’ve got an easy morning routine of chatting about what we’ll do each day. Self employed from home, we keep each other motivated to stay on task! Today I couldn’t goof off until I finished billing, answered emails and returned calls but I was in the art studio by noon. In true Aries fashion, I’d begun several paintings and had them set up around me in various stages of completion. In the midst of working on one of an out of body, astral flight, I began the one you see here to the right. I notice I’ve got an owl in many of my sketches. I never felt a particular affinity for them until recently. I was surprised to find I’d sketched so many through the years, several different kinds. The subconscious at work! I wrote here about –-> The owl as a medicine totem animal.

The red background came about when my ten year old Liquitex Naphthol Crimson tube tore as I used pliers to get the cap off. I figured I should use it before it becomes unusable. Hence the red background. After painting so long in watercolors, it takes some getting used to in working with the acrylics. My eye tends to scan the canvas first looking for what spaces to leave white and unpainted, which is what you do with watercolor. But with acrylic, I can use white paint for highlights after the fact. Being able to paint over something, as in acrylics and oils, is like the Undo key!

I freehand sketch on a white or toned canvas, and keep that image pretty firm in my mind as I paint over it. I give everything an undercoating of some color, usually whatever color I had the most left over from the last session. Acrylic paints dry out after a few hours, so I have to use the paint while it’s wet or lose it. I’ll tone the background of a new canvas with that color and use a darker color to underpaint whatever else is going to be painted.

I don’t often have a color scheme in mind until I start. When people are shown, I don’t decide on their skin tone until about halfway through. I like visual contrast: a darker skin with a lighter eye, hair many colors from dark to gold. If I’m finishing up skin tone on one painting and have a lot of paint left over, I’ll go over some shades or highlights in other portraits I’ve got in progress. I thin my paints with airbrush medium and it makes it like a watercolor wash, which I layer over each other. At some point between the dark and light washes, there will be a skin tone that particularly pleases me and I’ll stop there.

My worst habit used to be overworking a canvas. I used to add too much detail as well, going back into the painting after the fact. Now I stop short and let myself get used to seeing the paintings as they sit on their easels. I’ll work on each a little at a time and eventually I’ll know it’s done.