Spitpaint

Up until now I haven't had much use for facebook, but I have noticed in the last year  (Could have been going on longer but I'm oblivious) a growing theme among artists who make good use of it to get their work out there.  On top of that it seems like a faster way to interact with other artists than say,  CA or CGhub forums.   One of the best things I've found so far is a group that does daily 30 min daily speed paints, called Daily Spitpaint.

One of the major things I'm looking to improve this coming year is my speed and overall production of art.   For a long time both in college and after I've had a tendency to focus on a single painting at a time, noodling it until I thought it was prefect. That's fine if you're quick and can pump out good quality work fast, but that wasn't me.  I wasn't very fast to begin with and this bad habit only made it worse.   I would work long hours on a single image and by the end of the day I was drained and had little energy left to struggle and fight with a new sketchbook drawings or second painting only to do the same to it.   The past 3 years has been a long hard slog of breaking this cycle but one of the major things I think I'v been missing in my studies are more quick simple paintings/composition sketches.   These spitpaints have really been a great tool to get some of the ideas/elements I've had floating around in my head for awhile out and on the page quickly.  Speed paintings are nothing new of course, but I find it much more enjoyable to see what other are coming up with along with my own and what new words the group choose for the challenges!  I can't recommend participating in these enough.

"Chrome"

"Defy Gravity"

"Lady of Thorns"

"Messiah"

"The Burial"

I'm not quite to the level yet where I can produce a painting in under 30min, so all of these did take longer than that.  As such I haven't posted any of them up to the Facebook group because they don't meet the rules of the challenge.  But with some more practice and a bit more studies I cant wait to see what new stuff I'll be working on this year!  Need to work on defining those shapes and edges faster! God damn it.