Final thoughts of the month

Written 06/05/2025

Overall I was very happy with my work this month, I really enjoyed doing the life drawing and that's something I want to keep doing from now on as it really helped my artistic inertia - having to almost scramble while drawing makes it feel so exciting! (Which for as much as I've loved art throughout my life isn't an adjective I thought I would use for it). I also enjoyed the painting part, as I felt like I built on the drawing but more steady and planned (and oil paint is quite generous with mistakes and with mixing).

However, I did perhaps not do as much research as I should have on the MEDIUM I was using as I didn't anticipate the oil paint taking THIS long to dry (about a week). In fact, my painting is not completely dry as of today - but thankfully the weather is very dry and sunny atm so I can leave it on my windowsill outside to give it some sunlight (I assume this is okay)

I was also a bit disappointed that my painting strayed further than I would have liked from the original, my partner's mother suggested that I draw their sister in profile like the original but I preferred my off the cuff sketch that I did that hadn't been strictly posed (even though I imagine the original portrait had been posed for). Maybe it was my stubborness of trying to amalgamate different aspects of Gwen John into one protrait while kind of failing one of them at the same time (her muted colour palette). And maybe I should have used gouache paint since some of her work was gouache but that's all things I can consider in hindsight (the colour palette was due to struggling with 'muddying' my hues and also a practical 'I don't have infinite paint to experiemnt with').

But to conclude, although I don't think this was my favourite final piece I do think it was my favourite overall month of art study and I feel like I've really learnt a lot and there's so much more I want to take forward into my artistic future :)