I took six weeks off from painting. Vacations. Weddings. Resting. As I’ve come back to it, much of my time has been spent prepping for the thirty day challenge and working on drawing. I haven’t painted a blue face in some time. “But that’s fine,” I told myself, “I’m really comfortable with that. I can focus on something else for awhile.”
Which was true. Until I spent basically three months focusing on something else. Then apparently you lose some things. Interestingly though, the things I’ve lost aren’t what I thought they’d be. Mostly it’s that what I rely on in my process has been disturbed. Or in this case dried out. All of my premixed blue paints are now dry. I mixed them in little plastic containers with plastic tops. Air tight enough to last a few weeks but not air tight enough to last three months.
I knew this would happen but I hadn’t realized how much of my process depended on being able to grab a container of ready mixed paint. How clumsy I feel when I have to stop everything and do the color mixing thought process and labor. Or how my new air tight containers don’t ft a sponge very well- another tool my process relies on.
In one way, it’s nice to know that I’ve been working steadily on a process that fits me. On the other hand, oh boy. It’s going to take some leg work to get back where I was all those weeks ago. And I imagine that once I do have my pieces in place again, I’ll become more aware of all the other backtracking I did while away.
But in the meantime, I’ll start building up those blues again and I’ll figure out the sponge issue. It feels really good to be painting again.