ElleSee Paints: The Follow-Up to Self-Portraits for a Year

So for my 35th birthday year I planned on painting self-portraits each month as an art project where I would challenge myself to paint over the previous artwork and try new techniques an approaches to painting that I had not done before (find out why here).

While there were several months where I did not complete a portrait (I always forgot about it until the last hour before the beginning of the next month), and I have yet to paint the last self-portrait (the canvas is prepped with white paint), and I didn't really try any new techniques or styles in my painting (in most of the paintings the brush strokes look pretty much the same), but I did try to draw myself in different ways: closer, smaller mouth and bigger eyes, non-human...etc. That helped me to have a different approach to each self-portrait.

Would I do this again? Yes. I think I would. Though I forgot about it until the last minute every time, it was a lot of fun to get outside of my painting box (trees and landscapes) to try something new. What have you done lately that was outside of your regular box?

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ElleSee Paints: Self-Portraits for a Year

One day this Summer I had a rather strange opportunity to see inside the house of one of the board members for my work. She went to art school and even worked at one of our art galleries. The walls of her house are covered in various types of art, and she told me the stories about a few of that I had interest in and where they came from. 

One of the paintings she told me about was part of a project that she had done in art school. The instructor had them do a self-portrait and each week they had to paint over their portrait from the week before with a new self-portrait. This was to teach the students not to become attached to their artwork. She and a friend of hers exchanged portraits at the end of the term, and that was one of the paintings that I was looking at.

I thought it was a fascinating idea, and decided to do a painting of myself every month for my 35th year, starting in October. While I'm sure a lot of the portraits that were being done in that class were in the styles of the painters that they were learning about, I decided to tackle the concept myself (without all of the education). I am an amateur painter, at best, but I'm curious to see how the portraits differ from month to month, and what might influence my work. 

The image you see here is my October painting. I just completed my November painting today. You can find it here on Instagram.

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ElleSee Paints: Purple Birches

Earlier this year I started getting back into painting (after I did some work on this painting that's been bothering me for a while -- update to come). I started small with a 10"x10" piece, but had so much fun that I quickly moved up in size when I purchase this 30"x40" canvas. 

It took me quite a while to figure out what I wanted to do with it. But I was inspired by some artwork I saw in a home decor store, and soon started painting these purple hued birches (birch trees are my favourite tree). Since I completed this painting, I have bought another canvas and have already started another project that I'll share more about next month.

You can see some of the other stages that the painting went through in the photos below. I shared a lot of the progress on Instagram if you're interested in seeing more.

I really enjoyed experimenting with the paint and mixing the different colours for the leaves. It's fascinating how art starts in one direction, but can end up somewhere else that you never intended.

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Inspiration: Pushing out of My Comfort Zone

I was inspired by an Instagram photo from the beautiful Elsie of A Beautiful Mess. It had been a long time since I sat down and painted something rather large, and after seeing the painting that Elsie made, I was driven to create something completely different from what I normally would do. It pushed my out of my comfort zone.

I started it while my son was having his first sleep-over with my parents. I am a perfectionist when it comes to lines and white spaces in my paintings, but I held myself back and forced myself to let go. It felt good.

Has anything in particular inspired you lately? Have you forced yourself to let go and try something you haven't done before?

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