#paintinginprogress

After realizing my citadel technical armageddon dust had become mummified with very little of it left usable, I whipped up my own version to use as a basecoat.

Sharing with you the ingredients and then you can watch a timelapse of how I created this terrain base for the Warhammer 40k Redemptor Dreadnought I painted for the #ighchaptercharity.

It took me a few hours to find the perfect bush, an element crucial to the middle ground I sought for my painting series. The middle ground separates the white figure made of cubes in the foreground from the white houses in the background.

I'm talking to you about the series of paintings with cubic figures and their houses that I'm currently working on. Sometimes, the sheer length of artistic research like this surprises me, especially when I consider if viewers will even notice the bush!

So, I wanted a bush typical of French gardens, as I made sketches for this series in the French town of Niort. I envisioned it with cold green leaves and dense foliage to cast contrasting hard shadows, highlighting the white cubes of the figure through the stark contrast between light and dark.

I also desired a variable top contour for the bush, allowing me to adapt it to different backgrounds in future paintings. My requirements proved challenging to meet. Perhaps research would be easier if I were in France now, exploring directly instead of relying on the internet.

Regardless, I scoured online images. Google kept pushing Estonian websites, offering little information on French gardens. It's a curious thing—we often think of the internet as global, but research platforms and social media track our location, restricting us to content from our immediate area.

I employed various tricks to immerse myself in the French online space, like VPNs and fake locations, but they yielded little success in easing my research.

Finally, I turned to BARD, a Google AI language model I find helpful at times. BARD's solution worked magic today. I found my ideal bush: the Laurus Nobilis. It seems to tick all the boxes. A quick digital sketch suggests it's a perfect fit, but only transferring it to canvas will tell for sure.

I am having my first daily coffee. I love coffee. I have always loved coffee so much that it is probably my favorite drug. Coffee has something special. It is bitter and unpleasant, but every new sip gives me the desire to drink more. Life is like that. Every disappointment gives the desire to survive.

I am writing to you while I should be working. I had planned to start painting a new series of paintings in September 2023. Today is January 2024 and I still haven't started painting. It's true that I have been sketching all this time, but I think the real reason I haven't started painting is my fear of it. I find the task of painting landscapes with gardens too difficult. I'm still not very confident in my ability to paint nature.

I also have problems with the cubic figure I plan to bring to the foreground. I wanted it to be white, like the houses, to create a link between people and their homes. However, while I was making computer sketches, I realized that the white figure blends in with the white houses in the background. The composition also lost its focal point.

A few days ago, I came up with a solution of integrating a kind of green bush behind the cubic figure. However, I am still looking for the best type of bush to use.

Even though the feeling of fear to suppose is present, I am moving forward, even if it is much slower than I had originally imagined for the series.