Getting Out Of My Comfort Zone
They say the growth comes outside your comfort zone. Well I was way outside mine last week.
I had a 10″ x10″ stretched canvas that I did’t like the painting I’d done and I had an idea of something I wanted to try so I painted the background black with burnt umber mixed in to warm it up a bit. Then I splashed a few strokes of yellow in while it was wet so they pretty much disappeared mostly.
Then I got out my inspiration for my painting. That’s when things started to leave my comfort zone.
On a recent trip Jim and I took to Lake Marion, South Carolina to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary I bought a flour sack tea towel with a picture of a cotton plant on it. Fifty years ago the area surrounding Lake Marion grew two crops it seemed. Tobacco and cotton. We saw very little of either on our celebration trip.
Neither of us had ever seen cotton growing that first trip to Lake Marion and we were amazed at the plants so when we went back for our anniversary, I bought a towel with the decal of the plant on it.
I got out the towel and studied it. It was very monochromatic and I made it even more so by eliminating the shades of green in my painting. I wanted something much more monochromatic to pop on that black canvas.
The plant itself was much like a tiny tree. Usually when I paint a tree I start with a big brush and work my way down to a script liner, but in this painting I started with a script liner. Again, out of my comfort zone.
When I paint white I always underpaint it in a gray mix of ultramarine blue and cad orange with some white. Then I build it up getting whiter as I go. It gives it a fuller richer look and feel. That is how I created the cotton in this painting.
By the time the cotton is ready to pick the plant itself is brown and dried so that is what I was going for with the stems and the leaves. Various shades of browns, golds and tans.
From the very first brush mark on this painting I got more and more excited as it came to life. It has a very oriental feel to me and I was very pleased with it in the end. Does it look like a cotton plant? No, not really, but it is so pleasing to the eye and so calming that I don’t mind at all.
Another thing I did that was out of my comfort zone this week was I made a reel on Instagram out of it with some very closeup photography of it so you could see every stroke.
For me, getting out of my comfort zone in my color palette and my subject was just the ticket to create something I love and learned from. I’m sure I will be exploring this idea again.
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What would be out of your comfort zone. Post it on Instagram and tag me @kypaintster. I’d love to see everyone out of their comfort zone, if only for a moment. Click HERE to follow me on Instagram.
Thanks for stopping by today and let’s paint together real soon.
Sharon