I don't knooooooow

Hellouuuu. Another week has passed, time for another update. I actually wanted to post yesterday trying to get into the habit of at least updating every sunday, but I was just waay to friggin tired so I'm doing it now :)

So first off prepare for another 50 pages of ranting but well, I don't talk to anybody so I gotta get it out here in order to not go insane, besides as I already said a few times I just love ranting just for the sake of getting all the things that are on my mind kind of out there. At the same time I just HATE talking about that stuff (I mean verbally) I hate it when most people do it and I will probably never do it myself, most of all not if nobody actually asked for it. So yea writing it down is the best solution, I can get it out and at the same time you can just skip that shit and look at the pictures :D

The last few weeks I have noticed quite a change in the way my stuff looks, especially after I did those landscape studies and paintings from imagination. One thing that has always kind of thrown me off and which I couldn't figure out why is the fact that my studies, no matter if from life or from photos, and my masterstudies as well(although that might kinda fall out of that becaus emasterstudies by default are supposed by the original look of the painting) have a wildy different look to them than the stuff I would concider a personal Piece or Illustration. Not only did the studies themselves look kind of different but also the studies I would paint afterwards completely from imagination. AND not only would they look diffrent but I would also paint them differently completely.
The thing that was bothering me with that is that I actually like teh way my studies look MUCH more than my finished work, after I did them but I would completely ignore that insight when painting personal stuff, which now as I look back to it is really weird to me. Now when I look at the Oilpaintings I used to do a while back I notice that they have the same look to them like my digital studies and have NOTHING to do with what I would make a finished Illustration look like, and it's teh same there, I kind of like those paintings better than my finished portfoliostuff.
Now for the last few months I have been getting more and more sucked into a specific process of working when it comes to my Illustrations, which to summarize is basically to push it into the best Result I possibly could, rendering the shit out of it, which for sure is not a bad thing at all, BUT:
The more I did this the more I noticed that this way of working completely eliminates the process itself, and with it itsomehow even eliminates big parts of the skill you need to have to be concidered a good painter (now I mean what I would concider a great painter). What I mean by that eventually the risk you run into is that the process isnt a gradual built up until the finished result but more a constant tweaking, transforming, and basically licking that thing until it somehow looks finished with the right amount of rendering put on top.
I know that a lot of artist work that way but what I want to say here is that this is not what I actually think of being great paintings, sure it's tempting to work that way just because you eliminate failure almost completely just by making "pulling and pushing until it looks finally right" a part of the process. For me, however great painting is something else. For me part of great painting is being able to just nail stuff right away, having the ability to smack down a single almost messy looking brushstroke but being able to make it look right just the way it is and bein able to let it sit where it is in the finished painting. For me great painting was always kind of like boom,boom,boom done!! I have always admired Artist who could do that and I mean look at the old Masters, they worked that way, every stroke of applied paint just right the way it was, constantly building up the whoie thing conciously bein aware of every brushstroke making it intentionally and LEAVING it there. Like its simple: what is the point of a brushstroke when it's not correct, when you're gonna smudge the shit out of it?

Now to get back to my stuff, as I said with the studies I feel that practically all of them even the finished ones kind of have that feeling to them. I don't say that they are awesome or anything, no not at all but I do say that they show a way of me thinking while painting them that actually just HINTS at what I would concider "this is the right way to do it in order to achieve being a good painter someday in my life". For some reason I think it is actually fear + unconciously trying to do what is seen as popular these days I blended out that aspect completely when I was painting personal pieces, completely loosing the aesthetics that I normally would like about a painting.
So this kind of leans towards what I have been talking about in my last post when I talked about wanting to get something more "personal" stylewise and people would come to me and say I shouldn't worry this would come to me on it's own. But this is really not what I meant when I said that, sure I know that everybody kind of has his or her own style by default, it can't be avoided, what I was talking about was that something about the way I was painting just didn't feel right from the very foundation. Sure my stuff got better and more and more polished but at the same time it kind of got away from what I really think is cool and looks great.

So what I want to do now is to completely break out of it, and this piece is the first attempt in doing it, just totally doing what I like and how I think I can create a broader base to improve from, because another thing that kiiind of bothered me with the "licking stuff until it looks right"-technique is that study seems to become redundant in some way simply because it doesn't matter that much anymore. If something looks wrong just fondle with it until it somehow finally without really knowing why looks right and on you go. If a value looks wrong, lighten/darken it gradually until it fits in the picture, if a leg is too short select it and make it bigger, puzzle your piece together and render the shit out of it, BAM professional :D Now this might sound harsh or dickish but I don't mean to be that or to offend anybody. All it comes down to is that this is a persdonal opinion about what I think about my work so far and where I want it to go in the future and I think the change is going to be quite significant.
The last thing ( I think) is the consequence of the last thing I mentioned: NOW studying makes sense to me again, lifepainting shouldn't be supposed to teach you how to redo the effect of light on an object by accident but it should teach you how to BAM just being able to nail it and eventually enabling you how to smack in an accureate shadowshape with one single stroke which is just correct and will stay there visible in the final painting. Thats where I want to go, and I am not saying that my stuff is there at all, or that my stuff is good (actually I hate it more than ever these days). And I think that this painting here is a good step in the right direction, and I see so much stuff that sucks but the great thing is now, that I know what to do and where I want to go I can put my finger on it and say "yea THIS sucks, I am gonna study this and conciously push it in the next one".

As I said a long rant, and I think it's awesome if you read so far, and if you have thoughts on that feel free to drop your comment, as much as I hate hear people taling about that stuff I love reading it when people write about it :D

Oh and : Maybe I stress this too much but this is important to me: This is in NO way meant to be educational in any way. This is simply what I going on in my mind and conclusions which I make for myself. Most likely that stuff has noting to do with you as far as you learningexperiences in becoming an artist are concerned at all. So it's cool if you like what I write here and it'S even cooler if you can get something out of it, just know that there's no intention of educating people in here (somebody said on my last blogpost "nice lecture", that really freaked me out :D )

cheers and see you next time :)