Week 3 Recap of 30 Paintings in 30 Days, a Bit Late

Thanks for your patience on this one. The first two weeks of 30 paintings in 30 days went exceedingly well— I wasn’t quite on track, but it felt like I could ramp up a little and hit my stride with pieces produced in parallel. Things went off the rails for a minute over the past week or so.

I’m considering today to be day 21 of 30 paintings in 30 days. I took a break starting on Wednesday the 11th, which was day 16 of the project. I had planned to take a quick break during the weekend in which I went to the east coast, hoping to come back refreshed and ready to make more art. Unfortunately, the weekend didn’t go well, and I won’t recount the experience here out of respect for those involved, but my point is that I needed a bit more time to get back in the swing of the painting process.

That’s often how it goes with art— you can’t force it. It’s a blessing and a curse, and it’s a key characteristic of the lifestyle that I’m trying to build; I don’t miss the monotony of being always “sort of on,” in regards to a corporate job. Never quite working at 100%, but never able to go all the way to 0% effort. I had a period of that low point just now, which I consider myself lucky to weather, ramping back up.

Days 18, 19, and 20 were slow. I finished one piece, which I actually consider to be my favorite of the series.

I messed around with the palette on my Cézanne copy, which I hope to livestream today after I train one of my clients. Training and classes have taken up a decent amount of my time this month, having met a few times with two different clients for personal training, plus my first ever painting seminar!

I had a 1:1 session with someone who had reached out to me on TikTok. He saw my $80 latte concept and ran with it, requesting a 4 hour painting workshop in which we would go over specific problems that he has identified in his process. We spoke over the phone to get an initial understanding of what might be covered and we discussed pricing. He came over on Friday with all of his supplies and the class went really well!

We went over composition planning and I showed him a few base heuristics like the rule of thirds and the golden ratio armature. I showed him how we might take a photo and add it to Procreate and design a composition against it, or how we can take that photo and break it into steps for planning a piece regarding oil paint layering. We discussed color selection and some of the other base concepts of color in a palette—using a limited palette, digital tools which assist in color mixing (which is new to me), and eyeballing blending and working with the “mass” of paint. We discussed mediums and solvents and made critiques of various paintings.

He came into the day with many notions of what he wanted to learn, specifically brush techniques and approaching a painting, and he said that he learned a lot. I’d like to think that he got more than he expected, as we discussed concepts which I consider key to becoming a successful artist like reducing friction in your setup, ways to avoid perfectionism, and quantity over quality for the budding artist.

I recorded a decent amount of our session and I’m hoping to translate some of these concepts into my painting course, which is still evolving. Again I’ll give the shout that if you buy it now, it’ll contain lifetime access for all of my updated modules and lessons. You can find it here.

I’m not quite sure that I’ll get all 30 paintings done. I have three pieces in progress, two of which are 2/3 to complete. One more is barely started. I’m aiming to finish those this week which would make 13 pieces total. I don’t know if I’ll start any large pieces or if I’ll aim to just smash out a bunch of smaller pieces to get through the challenge. I’ll post another recap next week and it’ll be clear which direction I’m taking!

Thanks for reading!