2x10x4

I am continuing with the 10 minute paintings.

It is a great warm-up first thing in the morning. Best thing about such a tight time window is that you have to move fast and deliberately. This reminds me of what many martial arts teach, self control, mental and physical. With each painting I see how far away I am from all that, but I am also content knowing that consistent practice will eventually bring positive results :)

10x4

Find a simple object, divide your painting surface in to 4-8 small divisions, set you timer to 10 minutes and start painting.

What a great exercise! 

You train yourself to loosen up and let go, but in same time to sharpen your observation and develop confidence trough repetition. In a just an hour you can finish six paintings, that is lots of mileage I think! I remember our teachers back at Sheridan college telling us that we all have ten thousandth bad drawings in us, and sooner we work trough them we will start to be just OK. Well it sounds silly if you think of actually counting each work you do, but it obviously would take a long time to achieve that number. That means if you put in your time you will eventually show good results. It is like learning how to walk, baby keeps failing at first until after countless tries it finally takes that first step and eventually will be able to do martial arts or learn a whole ... That being said, there are some people who develop much faster than the other. I see this every year when I get a new batch of students. Some students seam to be soaking in all knowledge and producing great work, while other barely get by with minimum... But that story is for some other day.

Soooooo anyway, back to the exercise. If you do this 10 minute challenge for 60 minutes, five days a week every week, you would end up with 1440 finished pieces each year, and in 7 years you would have finally weed out all your 10000 bad paintings... I think I am one of those slow people, so it is taking me a longer time :)

This challenge was posted by Carol Marine, she is a fantastic painter a you have to check her blog out!

Bodrum bits and pieces

Painting with pastels is a joy, that is until you accidentally drop your pastel box on the concrete floor and watch them smash to million pieces!

left-overs

Naturally, I started swearing in my mother tongue and feeling quite upset :) Well, after calming down, I tried to see the upside of this event. I had all this tiny pieces, assorted in colour families.... hmmmm why not try to put them back together I say. I heard that if you grind up the bits and add water you can reclaim the pastels.

Collect all the bits (I sorted them in colour families)

Grind it up well

Add water with spray bottle and mix it well with apainting knife. I made couple of lumps and gradually added some white pastel to get different tints.

Shaped them in rough rectangles and left them to dry for a day. The quality is so so, a bit to rough and "chalky" for my taste. I really enjoy the smoothness of Terry Ludwig or Senellier pastels compared to these homemade ones. One interesting byproduct of grinding up different pastel colours together is that you get a slight confetti effect, meaning colour in not 100% uniform. I kinda like that, it makes the painting process a bit surprising. 

I ended using them in this study painted from acouple of different photos taken during my Turkey vacation. 

scuba diving spot near Bodrum