CanvasCalls: #175 - #178 Four the Birds 8/19/19 through 8/22/19

I spent the week digging through "The Artist's Way" - a book recommended by one of the artists on Daily Paintworks, Taryn Day. I bought her "Artbyte" called "An Artist on a Budget", with the hope of learning how she frames oil paintings. I have this idea to use linen tape to put them on front of a matt board rather than behind it, and her description of the segment claimed it showed an inexpensive way to frame your art and led me to think, "oh good, someone else has already figured this out." But her description of that was cryptic to me....with some keywords I was able to youtube my way to figuring out a potential method. But my $5 was not misspent. She recommended the the book, The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron....and made it sound like you'd be foolish not to read it. So I spent another $10 on Amazon and got the book. So far, I kind of like her sale's pitch on "how to become/stay/live creative" It's going to be a bit of an investment of time though. Something I'm short on with this quest of 300.

I also spent the week doing birds, four of them. I painted two previously: the chickadee and the sparrow - but on a much smaller scale (they were done on magnets). This time they were on 6x6 wrapped canvases. Such a luxury to have space to express the creatures, life-size! I found several more pictures of birds that I liked on Pinterest. I selected 2 more to paint....and voila, I have "The Bird Series" - 4 matching paintings. They went quite smoothly. When I say that, I have a brief thought, "perhaps I'm getting the hang of this, and it will now always go smoothly." But really? It won't, I'm going to hit more bumps. And if I'm not hitting bumps, it means I'm probably in a rut. And if I'm in a rut, then my artist-child is being squashed (that's from the book, not me). Before I am accused of being in a rut, I may do 4 more birds and call it a series of 8. We'll see.