painting progress: Offerings

This one started as a dream and evolved from there. I had an image of incense sticks burning brightly with swans through the smoke. I’ve been having a lot of swan dreams lately. the swans in the painting are cut from a book of victorian poetry. I love using old papers in my paintings, it’s becoming something I do in almost all of them. I feel like I’m about half way finished with it. I need to work on the water a lot, so far it looks more like mud than water so I’m a long way from that. I like working with the limited color scheme though. Once I’ve got all that sorted, then I want to make smoke coming down obscuring some parts of the painting and revealing others. I’m not sure how to do that though. I’ll probably experiment some with different combinations of paint.

I feel like I’m starting to evolve a style of my own. It’s kind of grungy, and old, and I seem to have a serious bird fixation recently. It’s fun just following where my dreams lead me. I like that so much more than trying to paint something in specific.