I Started Painting Again - And It's Hard

I've been trying to do more with physical media for a long time now. Hell, going all the way back to the first actual art-related post I wrote here on this blog called The Color Problem back in March 2021.

But there have been a few things holding me back. For one, I really love making my dark fantasy art the way I've been doing it the past few years: beginning with a pencil drawing on Bristol, inking it with brushes and a crow quill pen, and then scanning it in and doing the color work in Photoshop. Two, I knew it would be really hard to switch to a new medium, and I was reluctant to suck at something, especially knowing it would be a long time before I could "catch up" to even the modest skill level of my drawings. And three, I had to figure out what my new art style would look like. Would it essentially be the same thing, or would it be something completely different?

Well, I finally took a few rough steps forward, and the first thing I have to show for it is this humble little 6" x 6" painting on a wood panel. This began with a loose pencil sketch on the panel, then the acrylic painting, and then India ink over the top for the lines.

I won't pretend it's good, but it's better than not doing it at all.

There isn't a ton of painting experience in my background, though I was fortunate to have a great instructor in college who taught me some foundations. I did a fair amount of painting over the course of a year or so, including making things from imagination, but that was (shockingly) about 17 years ago now. So not completely starting from scratch here, but pretty close.

I got a lot of clarity while working on this about which materials I need and what style I want to aim for with these paintings, which is great. (Essentially, I think I'm just going to try to translate my current flavor of dark art over to the new medium.) I also got a lot of clarity around the fact that I really do love making art the "old" way, so don't expect me to stop doing that any time soon.

Not much else to say on this one. I'd love to promise there will be more and better of these in the near future, but as I discussed in my last post, I don't I have any free will, so only time will tell, haha.

What I can say for sure is that I started doing some small drawings as a guide to help me with my paintings, but I've been having a blast doing those for their own sake and they're quickly evolving into their own thing, so I will have some of those to share in the near future. For reference, here's the one I inked yesterday. (5.5" x 8.5" on this one.)

Thanks as always for being here. My goal with the blog moving forward is to establish a regular cadence for these posts so there's no more guessing about when one will appear. I'll let you know once I've established something consistent I can point to.

In the meantime, subscribe for email notifications and follow me over on the Instagram. See you next time.