Mars: Birthday #17

In the first of this month's birthdays, today I have my 17th birthday on Mars. That'll be the lowest number we see this month, since Mars orbits the Sun the slowest.

To give me something to talk about in these posts, I've decided to do something I don't normally do and post some photos of a painting in progress. I started this one in March, and it's not finished as of today, so this will be some good motivation to keep working on it. It was actually directly inspired by my previous painting, though I expect the link will not be obvious; I'll reveal it when the painting's done, and leave it to your imagination in the meantime.

Anyway, for this painting, I needed a background looking like bark, so I decided to try something new and do some plein air painting. En plein air is a French term meaning “outdoors,” and plein air painting is the act of painting outdoors, as opposed to inside a studio. While I could simply look up bark textures online, I decided I wanted to paint one from life, so I packed up some supplies and headed out to the nearest tree.

Setting up the easel and canvas next to my model.

Turns out plein air painting, especially with acrylics, is a very different beast to painting indoors. I picked a moderately sunny day, and my acrylic paint—already known for drying quickly—was drying even faster both on the palette and the canvas. I made liberal use of the spray bottle I brought with me, furiously misting everything in an attempt to keep everything damp enough to work with, but still ended up rushing to capture the texture as quickly as I could (I sketched it out roughly on the canvas first). While this generated a unique sort of pressure to the painting, I don't think it was negative, exactly; I ended up using some very fast, loose brush strokes, which gave it a somewhat freer quality than normal for me, I think. Anyway, here's a shot I got of myself with the finished product:

The Sun came out from behind the clouds after a while.

…and here's a closeup of the canvas:

Sort of looks like bark, if you squint?

As you can see, I only used the tree as a reference for the texture, not the color. As to why I chose the particular colors I did, well, that's part of the composition…which I'll reveal on my next birthday! For now, I'll leave you with the fruit of my first experiment in plein air painting, while I get back to work. A hui hou!