Nearing Completion

I am now nearing completion of the painting shown below. Though I still need to paint the girl's hair, add a few shadows here and there, and add more layers to the face to achieve the right warmth, shadow and glow, whatever else I might add can't really do much to change how the painting already looks now.

I did mention before that I wanted a detailed face. But working on the face as much as I did made me feel sorry for having covered up the earlier tonal guide as shown on the earlier stages of the work. For one, the strong contrast was pleasing and it gave the face a dynamic quality that was lost later on. I will need to find a way to bring back some of that quality without roughening up the face.

One impulse that has been annoying me lately as I finish up on this piece is that impulse to make drastic changes on the work. On my part, it is easy to get distracted and imagine the hand clutching some coins and rolled up bills between the fingers as what commuters and jeep conductors would normally do. But I've been trying to convince myself that adding that element would confuse the picture and shift the viewers attention away from the expression of the kid and redirect it into an interaction happening within the frame.

But then I remind myself that the composition I came up here was worked out during a time when I wasn't that comfortable working with too many elements – let alone paint in oil.

I've shown a picture of the unfinished painting to a few friends and it seems that the subject is not that apparent to most. Since I'm not comfortable adding another element into the picture to complete the story so to speak, I might as well insert that revelatory element into the title. Hence, “Tagos sa Yero ng Jeep and Titig mo Hija”.

On a different note, I had a couple of canvas frames constructed by Sunga Sash Factory of Antipolo. The craftmanship was above reproach. In fact, what I got was so much more than what I expected. I just wanted a simple wooden frame to stretch my canvas on, but instead I got a heavy, solid, interlocked wood frame with the inner edge of the frame skillfully sanded off.

I seem to have a number of blank and primed canvas hanging around. It's a good way for me to be reminded of the things I have to start working on, though I have to admit that it can get annoying at times.

One time I was walking in "National Bookstore" in my town, when I came across these acrylic paints. In that spate of impulsiveness, I ended up purchasing gold and copper with only a vague notion on how I will use them. As I walked out the store, I was thinking of using the gold as a base for some yellowish green transluscent area for a painting depicting a pool scene at night.

But once I've sketched out the scene and did some rough underpainting on a primed canvas, the gold acrylic doesn't seem to fit the painting anymore.

Since I've paid good money for those tubes, I feel that I'd better come up with a good application for them. It's just that, the way some things look like in your mind does not always translate well once you mix paints to achieve the same effects.

Annoying. But I would like to think that it is a limitation imposed by skills rather than an insurmountable physical limit imposed by the medium.