Making Of a Painting // Hole Hearted - DAY 3 January 2007

Thought it would be fun to share my painting process... as it's going down... So every day till this painting is done I will be posting updated images on my blog at: http://www.myspace.com/scottsaw

Check it daily and feel free to spout out. Here is Day Two - visit my blog to see day one.

DAY THREE (Jan 7, 2007)

Painted from 1pm-2pm while my son took a nap... then i took the lil guy to the beach and the park for the afternoon - was such a beautiful day. Made it out to the studio around 8 and painted till 1:30 or so. Here's how it went:

So in the afternoon i knew i only had an hour or so while my son slept so i didn't start anything too involved... i decided to clean up the lines around the cloud shapes using a liner brush - man i just got hip to the liner brushes, they rule! can't believe i never used them before. So then when i came back at night i started to paint the heart. Here i am just blocking in the lightest colors.

Starting to block in some darker colors and beginning to give the shape some form.

Bringing in darker colors and pushing the form.

Again, applying darker colors to the edges and crevices of the shape.

The shape is starting to really take form as i use darker colors to define it.

I painted the some of the veins gold to make them drop back and become less important - i will refine them a bit later, but i wanted to downplay them - seems simple, but if you ever wanna make something more subtle, just ad the background color to it and it drops back. Then i roughed in my holes.

At this point the heart has come a long way... but its only about 50% done. i still have another full night on it. Remember the beginning of Pink Floyd-the wall, when that hallway gets longer and longer as you walk down it... that's how i felt last night, that every phase i passed just opened up the door for more and more work. Seems like such a simple thing... to paint a heart - and i was all naive when i hit the studio thinking i would kill it in one session... but man, lemme tell you - a heart is complicated thing in so, so, so many ways, hence my obsession with it.

Blurry ass shot of me in that eternal stare... you know, when you don't blink for like 4 hours cuz your all wrapped up in a painting... i swear my eyeballs were dry. dig the sporty ucsb hoody! it kept me fuckin warm in my cold studio.

My references for the night... and my lil helper owls :) I tend to use old paintings for reference sometimes, why not, they represent a major troubleshooting session so at a glance you can go right back to that mind frame. The painting of the skull lin the bkg is a painting i made last week. OK - thx for checkin - see ya tomorrow.

To Be Continued ... keep an eye on my blog to see what happens next - will update daily till its done:

http://www.myspace.com/scottsaw