I have painted for the last 16 years after retiring from teaching elementary school. I love expressing my feelings and images through art mediums. I always tried to integrate that into my teaching. Plus I was working, on my own time, to improve my art skills, especially drawing.
I expressed myself with clay for many years, making pots, clay jewelry and on sculptures. When I began to focus on painting on the clay, I knew it was time to go to painting on paper and canvas in watercolor, then pastel, oil and acrylic.
I paint almost everyday and love problem solving with paint to get to my end result. The problems for every artist are the amount of light and dark, a range of colors (I like using complimentary ones like blue and orange), and composition shape of the overall design (like s or or c shapes so that the viewers eye can follow the movement. It keeps my brain exercised as well as those wonderful feelings of success when I achieve my goal.
Sometimes I set aside the planning and step by step process and just put on happy music (I love to use Motown) and just start painting whatever comes to me! I also use classical mood music for quieter moody paintings. This intuitive painting is fun and has no preparation as far as designing its composition. I do usually preselect a topic and some colors. But I usually just go with my gut feelings and start painting!
The intuitive painting comes all at once but then takes days to sort out sometimes where I was going with the feeling, figures or scenes that I painted, in order for me to feel satisfied with them. Those kinds are best not overworked.
But that is my biggest challenge as an artist. Fiddling with parts of the paintings to make them better. I work on several pieces at once so I won’t overwork them.
I love both types of art work and that is my favorite thing to do in life: Express myself with art!
Margaret