I have started watching The Office on Netflix while I work. I cannot concentrate unless I have noise going on in the background, and it has to be something that I know so that I don’t really have to pay attention to it. For some reason this helps me stay focused. And I know that I’m not the only one who does this. In fact, I once worked with a lady who would listen to all of the Harry Potter movies as she worked- one after the other- over and over. But anyways, I am now “watching” The Office on loop. In the past I have watched American Dad or Family Guy or even Mystery Science Theater (because I’m a dork). When I don’t have something to listen to my mind is all over the place and I can’t stay on one task. However, there is a side effect of this. When I look at an illustration that I painted I always think about the episodes of whatever show I was watching while I painted it. For instance, in the illustration above I was painting the flowers during the episode where the Scranton branch thought it was going to be shut down (only it turned out the Stanford branch was closing).
The illustration above is titled “Lantern” and prints are available here. There are always at least a few little things that I want to change in any illustration, but every once in awhile a painting turns out exactly like I wanted. And this is one of those times. One of the things that I was worried about was the particular shade of bluish green that I had envisioned often ends up looking more like turquoise. For this painting I added a bit of yellow to my emerald green to keep it from going over the edge into turquoise land. Originally I was thinking that the entire sky would be bluish green, but it became apparent shortly into painting the sky that that was too much so I had to quickly mop up some of my color to make room for some pink and yellow. I used salt for a little bit of texture and an opaque white paint for the magical stars.
I’m off to work on sketches for my next painting and to listen to more of The Office 🙂
