creation part 1

I always like to use my own photos for reference, and I have a lot, so I started there. I chose a photo from our Saskatoon berry picking adventure earlier this month, because of the brightly colored berries against the green background. I very quickly sketched it out and got right to painting. I eventually discovered that for the size of the canvas my berries were quite small, leaving a LOT of green. Not what I had in mind. (Note to self: take more time to look and sketch before starting to paint.) Instead of forcing myself to finish the painting, I stopped, took pictures, and plan on starting over. I've already re-cropped my reference to focus more on the berries, with a lot less background to deal with. And I'm so confident in my skills already that I'm going to use one of my larger canvases. The nice thing is I'm not wasting the small canvas - acrylics are opaque so you can paint right over them!

Even though I spent several hours on this never-to-be-finished piece, I don't feel it was a waste of time. I hadn't used acrylics for well over a year, so this was a good warm-up. I finally broke out of my norm and tried something new. It was fun.