{"id":407,"date":"2017-04-22T01:52:35","date_gmt":"2017-04-22T01:52:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/?p=407"},"modified":"2017-04-22T01:58:58","modified_gmt":"2017-04-22T01:58:58","slug":"the-balancing-act","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/2017\/04\/22\/the-balancing-act\/","title":{"rendered":"The Balancing Act"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Bare
In progress pastel painting, “Bare Tree and Pond.”<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I chose to use pastels during last month’s Yosemite Western Artists pleinair outing. It had been awhile since I’d worked with the medium and I committed to perform a pastel painting demo in June. I like to have a lot of new samples, in the medium I’ll be using, to display during\u00a0demos, so it will be pastels from now until the June.<\/p>\n

I spend most of my time painting in oils, but last year I painted in acrylics all year long in prep for a week of taking park visitors out to paint Yosemite, on behalf of\u00a0the Yosemite Conservancy’s Art Center. They didn’t want me taking groups out to paint in oils for fear they’d irresponsibly dispose of their solvents.<\/p>\n

I work in a wide variety of mediums, oils, acrylics, watercolors, pastels (haven’t dabbled in encaustics, yet), always have. I\u00a0think I’ve\u00a0discovered something useful to all artists in my experience doing this.<\/p>\n

With great painting\u00a0the elements in your subject matter determine application. You apply paint different when painting water than you do when painting trees or rocks, for example. Here’s where balance comes into play: whenever you become comfortable with any given medium (balance), you begin to take its application for granted. \u00a0It becomes too easy to rely on past “pat” successful application approaches, instead of letting elements determine fresh methods of application.<\/p>\n

When you work with a medium you haven’t touched for awhile,\u00a0you have no choice but to work with the attributes particular to that medium, redetermining application approaches. You’re a bit out of balance for awhile. The attributes of pastels, for example, force different application solutions when painting water, trees or rocks, than working with oils does. Acrylics, another unique set of attributes, as is the case with watercolors or graphite pencils or encaustics, etc.<\/p>\n

When you return to your original medium of choice, you do so with fresh eyes (having been away from it for a time) and\u00a0possibly new application approaches. For me, anyway, this\u00a0ongoing introduction of imbalance, through use of a\u00a0variety of mediums has kept me moving forward\u00a0and cut down on repetition. I highly recommend it!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I chose to use pastels during last month’s Yosemite Western Artists pleinair outing. It had been awhile since I’d worked with the medium and I committed to perform a pastel painting demo in June. I like to have a lot of new samples, in the medium I’ll be using, to display during\u00a0demos, so it will … Continue reading “The Balancing Act”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1],"tags":[34,4,29,33,8,32,35],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=407"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":415,"href":"https:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/407\/revisions\/415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/trowzersakimbo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}