time, money and materials

so let's say you just stretched a new canvas, let's say it's kinda big. maybe 2 1/2 x 3 feet. what is that 15, 20 dollars worth of canvas? you paint on it for a few days, enough for some early layers of paint to start drying and finally you realize you've made some bad choices and it's not going to become anything but an eye-sore. what do you do? 'nother question: how many canvases like this do you have leaning up against the walls of your home?

You put it aside and let it cook in your mind with the intent of 'working it into something unbelievable.'

You now have a starting point for creativity. Really - what absolutely *wild* thing can you do with it?!?

Of course, I (think) you can gesso over it and do something else ( a cop out ).

In regards to your second question, I have one canvas I started back in 1998. It was my second attempt at painting - which I simply can not do without nervously sweating all over the damn thing. But one day.... o-o-o-o-o-o-ne d-a-a-a-a-ay!! (shaking fist).

ok, so, how would you go about beginning to work on it again? do you just add paint, do you prepare the surface with some secret medium??

how often do you do this, what is the result? does it get so slick that you no longer feel the tooth of the canvas? how does that effect your next painting session?

ONE! i have t-o-o-o many...

you realize you've made some bad

The answer to the second question is that if you don't have quite a few failures, you have not had enough practice to develop your skill. So, it is a good sign if you have a goodly number of these.

But if you decide the work goes nowhere while you are doing it, rather than after, you may not have done your homework.

This means having had an inspiration, an original vision that you were trying to document in the first place. You must know the reason you want to make a painting in the first place and what you are trying to say. This is your guiding light.

This should have been followed by many many sketches first in pencil or pen, then color sketches if was going to be a painting.

Having decided on the best sketch, you can then execute your vision. Your piece will 'go somewhere' because you have already worked out exactly where it should go. Had the preliminary sketches gone nowhere, you would have been able to abort the project before the canvas stage.

The final piece you put on canvas will be the message, ideational or purely visual, that originally came to you. You will have done your technical homework, so the final product will have meaning.

This would be my solution to the problem.

Just add paint.

I don't have the intimate experience with oil painting to answer these questions. But between riding bikes with the neighborhood kids and watching cartoons, I've seen my father re-gesso and re-paint.

certainly a hole in my system. sometimes i paint without sketches, sometimes i use a sketch but never a color prelim. your absolutely right and it means it's my own damn fault, however, it is unnatural for me to work in any other manner, but you have found my flaw and now i'll just slip back into my own stylistic heaven and hell...

I don't have very much art lying around. There are a few things in limbo but they won't be there for long. They will either be finished or sanded down and repainted. There's a still-life painting I got bored with underneath the self-portrait on the upper-right part of my page. I didn't even bother to resand it or mute it down but I did put the background in quickly.

Finished paintings are sold quickly even at a laughably low price so that I can have the room and I always go on the assumption that I will make things in the future that will make the current paintings/drawings look like sh*t.

Jane

If you are going to leave a painting for a few days it's sometimes a good idea to just WIPE IT DOWN with a rag, perhaps with some mineral spirits before starting to paint again on it. You will have something to start from and the painting surface will remain fresh. Don't hold on to every little success. Be more concerned with getting the picture to move, or hang together. I love to work on that blurry surface that I just described. All the color relationships are there, you just have to jump in and paint

Be careful about using mineral spirits. Mineral spirits remove acrylic varnish. Some acrylic varnishes double as mediums. So, you may be removing the medium you have mixed your pigments with.

I guess I wouldn'thave to take this into considation because I use oil paint and my only medium would be turpentine and possibly some linseed or stand oil. The odd times I might add in Damar. So wiping the whole thing down would be no problem.

thanks for the feedback, this makes perfect sense to me.