A pretty big If...

Well, THAT didn't turn out the way I expected!

I gessoed over the repeated messes of the last couple of days (not yesterday's whale, which I love) and thought I'd try a new technique: scraping tubes of paint along the canvas.

I was picturing mostly white, with these cool scrapes of color across it? Great idea -- except -- turns out I was squeezing too hard and put WAY too much paint on the canvas, so when I started scraping it all mixed together (although... maybe I was supposed to let the blue paint dry before smearing the quinacridone gold over it?

Anyway -- it became this really complicated mess -- BUT -- I really liked the green that resulted, so I did the white smearing thing around the edges, added some interference gold and some textural marks and -- voila! Pretty intriguing result.

I'm not sure it's me, and I'm not sure I'll keep it (I really want to try this technique again and actually get it right) but I do think it's kind of cool. And does anyone else see that sort of face in the lower left? Wolf? Dog? Anyway, another fun experiment to add to my collection.

And even though yesterday I was grumbling about all the turquoise I've been doing, I have to say -- I was looking around at the paintings I've been doing this last couple of weeks, and -- despite some obvious exceptions -- I'm actually really proud of them; the most consistently pleased I've been with my work in quite some time. Yay!

so... what do we learn from this one? Not everything is gonna turn out the way we hoped or expected -- but that doesn't have to be a bad thing. If you can keep an open mind, there might be something totally new and unexpected for you to learn from and appreciate. It's just -- these days, that's a pretty big if...