Making Delightful Things

This painting helped me take risks and relax my iron grip on making perfect art. I know – fearless person that I am, I dared to try a weird idea in my zero-stakes hobby.

I reached a point in the painting where I could have stepped away – the rainbow scales were done, the fins and the face were one solid color. However, it looked rather bland for a multi-colored fish.

I was struck with inspiration for zebra stripes, but proceeded to hem and haw about whether it was too off the wall. As it turns out, zebra stripes makes the whole thing fabulous.

Art is about generating a feeling and memorializing it in permanent form. My goal is to delight myself, so I need to remind myself that my focus is to look for new and cool ways to create delight. Not aim for perfection.

I mean, perfection does delight me. But you know. Trade-offs.

Other interesting facts about this painting:
– Most of the colors are combinations of three colors only: dark blue, magenta, and pale yellow!
– I used a normal pencil to sketch outlines on the canvas and learned that graphite is hard to cover over. Graphite is oil-based, so it fights with acrylic. Watercolor pencils work much better – which I use exclusively from this point forth.

Bet you were thinking about this