Yorkie Portrait Off to a Good Start

Sometimes with the little paintings, I get going when I start painting and before I know it, I’ve gone much further than I expected to at one sitting. This is what happened with Mel’s portrait.

There’s often a moment when an artist looks at a painting while it progresses and says to themselves “I’ve accomplished it”. This doesn’t first happen at the end when everything is pretty and all finessed. It happens somewhere along the way when you suddenly see you’ve got the basic look and feel of the finished art.

Some paintings fight you all along the way–and you wonder if you will ever get to where you want to go. Sometimes you hit a good look when the first rough underpainting is done–then lose it again as the paint gets more thickly applied. That’s the scariest thing for me because it’s much harder to get back something you lose.

Once in a long while, a painting may go so far off track, I know the only way to make it happen is to go back to square one, cover up the whole painting with a flat layer of paint and start again. Not fun. Of course it takes a lot more time than I allocated but it is the only way to save a painting that as gone astray.

Fortunately–none of those things have happened here and I’m well on my way to a solid finished painting. Yippee!