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It remains a mystery to me how lights that were working last year can magically fail while sitting in a box for a year.
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More colour.
Oct. 22nd, 2025 05:59 pm
More colour. I have a tendency to talk more about the "what" over the "why" with my painting. It's not without critical content. Like why acrylics over oils? One reason is they are an inherently post-war, industrial, material-science creation. They embody mid-century optimism that things could be done better and in a more egalitarian way. They are the paints anyone can access in the post war utopian world H. G. Wells imagined in "The Shape of Things to Come" and Gene Roddenberry imagined in the original "Star Trek". They're from an imagined future that doesn't suck. #acrylic #acrylicpainting #painting
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The first bit of colour, using lessons learned from the painting of Gwili Andre earlier this year. This is a slightly awkward intermediate phase. "Trust the process," he says to himself. #painting #acrylicpainting #acrylic
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Well... for the first time since 2004 I own a car. Coincidentally, it is a 2004. At 21 years old it isn't pristine, but it is entirely paid for up front. It feels strange owning a car again.
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This morning's little bit of progress before I need to herd the cats for a vet visit. #acrylic #acrylicpainting #painting
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This is something I haven't tried before: doing the hair with a grisaille and a glaze rather than alla prima and impasto. 10 minutes of painting after hours of procrastinating and fretting — the other part of the process no one talks about. No one posts reels of staring at the painting for half an hour, cleaning the cat box, more staring, more trivial chores, more staring, drinking coffee and doom scrolling in front of the painting, ten minutes of painting and the the horror of realising it is almost noon and you have badly wasted a day off from the day job. #acrylic #acrylicpainting #painting #process
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I think I am happy enough with the grisaille on the face to move on to other parts of this painting. And yes, it's not technically a grisaille because it is actually phthalocyanine blue instead of a black, but there is a reason for that. #painting #acrylicpainting #acrylic
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The likeness is starting to come together. Starting. I'm so dreadfully slow. These in-progress pictures are part of the process now. I often notice things that I wasn't seeing until I sit back and pick up the phone. I may be influenced by styles and processes that are hundreds and even thousands of years old but I'm mostly working with materials that are only decades old, some only a few years old and my process is wrapped up in technology that's only come to be in my lifetime. #acrylic #painting #acrylicpainting
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Another few minutes of tweaking. The last thing you want to do when painting features is think "nose", "ear", "lips" and let some "how to draw a(n) X" preconceptions get in the way of what is actually going onâyet I keep doing it. Something that's rarely talked about is how much unlearning it takes to get where you want to go.
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Things have stories. I have this old 1909 ha'penny. It's not really worth anything. I use it to tap my fountain pen on. You can see the nicks from that in Britannia and Edward. What amuses me about this one is it's bent from being used as a screwdriver and there is a lot of wear from decades of circulation after it was bent. These things were demonetised in 1971, 54 years ago, so all those decades of wear were before that. Someone a hundred years ago or more and 7,500 km away had some trivial little fix to do. I wonder what it was? There we all are wandering through time and the world, leaving tiny little marks. Maybe no one notices, maybe someone does.
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Grisaille hell â well, not really. But I am learning from mistakes made on previous paintings to not jump into the colour glases to quickly just to end up painting over it all because of a fundamental mistake. How about getting the foundation right first? I'm struggling with the third big challenge of this one. The lighting is nothing like the high contrast source photos I've been working from previously and the subtleties are tough.
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Alright, that image of Auschwitz came up in my Facebook reels again, but with the right context this time. It was part of an ad for a movie about someone helping people escape from a concentration camp. Weirdly it's set in Kraków-PÅaszów, not Auschwitz, but whatever. So it was Meta that glitched, showing part of one ad reel in another. Really unfortunate for the Mr. Worm car guys.
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