the evolution of a style, and a major undertaking

Okay, so I've been working on some paintings for a while now, which will be posted after Christmas. I hadn't painted for a year, and before that hadn't painted for probably more than a year, and never really learned how to paint anyway. Yes folks, an art major who never learned how to paint, how sad is that? It was like everyone assumed that art students knew how to paint, and most of them did. When I see detailed realistic paintings I am just blown away, because I cannot for the life of me figure out how to do that. How do you DO that with paint?? Paint is this wild and crazy goopy uncontrollable thing to me. Colored pencils seem to be the natural extension of my hand and brain, and paint has always been a struggle and something I avoided and was never all that fond of anyway. But over the years people really liked the occasional painting that I did, and they certainly are much faster than the uber-meticulous pencil works, and of course when people express interest in buying them that sorta perks me up and makes me think I need to paint.

So I've been painting. These are not works for sales but they will be followed by many that are. And what started out as a struggle, trying to figure out how to get paint onto the huge canvases, has turned into something, and slowly, somewhat painfully, turned into my style. I have a painting style. What a relief! The funny thing is it involves a lot of drawing. I get the form and colors down in acrylic, let that dry, and work back into it with pens. It turned out really interesting, and I'm not entirely sure where this style came from.. I can explain it better when I can post the pics, but it's definitely influenced by the way I draw (outlining) and the work I've done in printmaking (using lines to create form and roundness). How fun. It was like once I started into it with pens it just clicked and became beautiful, whereas just the paint felt clunky and unfinished.

I'm also doing a very hugely major website revision. Haven't done that for a while so it's time, and I need to rearrange it in order to get the Standard images on there. I'm going to be removing some of the old or non-relevant work, and adding a TON of new stuff. I'll be changing the way the pages are set up too, and I hope that goes over well. I'll be putting thumbnails of images on a main page, and you can click on that to go to a page with a larger images and more info. Meaning each image will have it's own page. (ugh, what am I getting myself into?). I just think it's a way to showcase each image a little more and be able to write a better description of each one. It'll be a heck of a lot of work and it has to be done by early January, so between that and 47 million other things I have my work cut out for me. Anyway I've been sitting here staring at the computer for a while so I think it's time to call it quits for a while.