Make / 30 challenge inspired by Kickstarter’s Make / 100 project
November 29th — 2019
So, on 28th November 2019, I saw Make/ 100 project on Kickstarter. I was very inspired by it and wanted to participate but India was not an available country to select in the participant form — saying directly it is not available in India.
I was very excited about it because somewhere I knew that it will be going to push me to paint more and most importantly it will make me paint every day. So I requested them to start this project in India as well in their country request form. But still, I was strongly feeling to do it by myself. So, I challenged my self to do it.
I also thought about writing a daily blog describing how I painted every painting and will share it with Kickstarter and to the world or something!!!
The first step was to decide what to paint.
And I knew I wanted to paint flowers. Because that’s what I love to do.
The second thing was — I had to decide the timeline. Although I have studied management, I am very poor at deciding the timeline of the project. I can’t blame my self, it was hard studying while doing the job as a web developer. (Well, you know!!)
for the timeline, I decided it to be 30 days, as Kickstarter’s Make / 100 project also has the same timeline. Doing this thing will going to be so hard for me because I hardly paint 4 to 5 times a month. Anyway, according to the timeline, I calculated that on average I have to paint 4 paintings each day (Including Sundays!!).
Well, artists don’t worry about Sundays, right?
So, the next step was — where to find 100 flowers? And the answer is very simple — the Internet.
The next morning, I started painting my first flower. I used 9 x 9, 300 gsm, cold-pressed 100% cotton watercolor paper and Royal Langnickel’s gouache colors.
I started with my favorite flowers — Daisy.
It was a bit easy for me because in the past I’ve already painted this flower.
Next, I used a pencil to see how and where to place flowers and I went with painting the flowers first.
But before jumping with brushes to my paper, I made color swatches, because as you know gouache dries out differently than you see them on your pallet.
After painting the flowers, I painted the leaves. For painting leaves, I used the wet — thick method. So that both colors can blend easily. For that first, I went with the watery Deep Green and tick layer of Green Med. It made a beautiful effect on the leaves.
The next step was detailing flowers and leaves. I used two different shades of Green to details leaves and used Titanium White color to detail my flowers.
Then it was time to do the background. For choosing the color, I was very confused. I knew I wanted to do a Blue background but was not sure of what shade.
My husband came to help and we decided on the color. After finishing the background color I corrected some leaves and flowers.
And this is how the finished painting looked like.
I am very happy with what I did. I could see that my skills have been improved and it gave me the motivation to complete this challenge. I was very very happy until I realize how much time I spent on only one painting. I started at 10:00 AM and it has been 2:00 PM already!
Now, you must be thinking why a 9 x 9 painting took this much time? — well, first of all, I am not a highly skilled artist and the second thing is I have to some house chores daily.
And that made me change my mind. I will tell you more about this with my second painting which is — Yellow wildflowers.
Thank you so much for reading!
You can also check out my WordPress blog here: https://artprojects4.art.blog/
