Sec and destroy!

I used to paint all the time, in fact that was all I used to do. I didn't sketch or ink line drawings, I just sat and painted day in and out. When I was at college I had a fantastic turnaround on paintings and absolutely no fear at approaching a canvas. Then I got a job and my working life with Photoshop began, first with photographic retouching but quickly I started using it for illustration work. And with that came the ability to undo any major mistakes you might have made, even before the Command Z option in Photoshop was available you could always save an illustration as you went along and so go back a generation or two of saved files to be free of any mistakes.

And so I stopped painting traditionally and everything went onto the computer. In the last fifteen years I've finished two pictures using a paint brush and paints on a board, only two! I tried about two years ago to get back into painting traditionally but it was like there was a block on how to do it, every time I started I'd hit a wall and become frustrated. But now I'm going to start again, slowly and hopefully I'll be able to get back to a stage where I'm happy to attack the canvas with vigour again.



To begin I'm going to paint up some sketches I produced previously and just see what happens. So this week it's a fairly straight forward portrait painting of a Doctor Who villain, the hybrid Dalek Sec. This is painted onto A4 sized paper with acrylic inks and was completed in two hours, which I'm not sure is a good thing or bad, certainly got a lot to re-learn. Fell back on a few old tricks rather than trying something completely new and I've also discovered that I need a lot of new paint and paint brushes so a trip to the art shop is due. I like acrylic ink but its more like solid watercolour than a thick paint. Time allowing I'll have another new quick painting next week, practice makes perfect or so they say.