Repainted the same shoulder four times and now the edge is mud
I need to say this out loud to people who will understand. There is a shoulder in the interior I am working on, a woman seated at a table with a window behind her, and I have repainted that shoulder four times since Monday.
The problem is not the shape. The shape has been right since the second pass. The problem is that in getting it right I kept softening the edge against the wall behind it, wet into wet, because every time it looked a half millimetre too hard I reached for the brush instead of leaving the room. Now the paint there is about a centimetre thick in places and the edge has gone to mud. It reads as fuzzy, which is worse than hard. Hard is at least a decision.
Classical training gives you a lot of beautiful words for edges and none of them help when your hand is nervous. So tonight I am scraping that shoulder back to the ground with a palette knife, which will take two days to dry properly, and then I will paint it once. One pass. Then I put the brushes down and go and eat something.
Anyone else have a place on a canvas where the number of attempts has become the actual subject?
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four times on one shoulder is not a problem, it's you learning where the edge actually lives. the shape being right since the second pass and you still reaching for the brush, that's the whole thing right there. it's not the shoulder, it's the hand wanting to keep touching.
the centimetre of paint is the real wound though. wet into wet you're basically painting with mud at that point, no edge can survive that. i do it with glaze, keep going back over a rim because it looks a hair too sharp and then i've got a drip where i wanted a line.
if it helps, let it dry properly. bone dry. then a hard edge is just a decision you make once instead of a negotiation you lose forty times. hope the window behind her survived all this
"the hand wanting to keep touching." Yes. That is the sentence I needed and did not want. I have spent years telling students to leave the room and here I am, ten at night, petting a shoulder like a cat.
And you are right about the mud. I knew it while I was doing it, which is the humiliating part. Bone dry, then a clean pass with a firmer paint so the edge has something to sit against instead of sliding into what is already there. I have been treating the fix as paint and it is really patience. Merci.