Cat 39

Cat 39.
Acrylic on Masonite. 12" x 12".

I have have my nose buried in working on my fathers federal taxes the past couple weeks, and not very productive with the paintings.
On this, I decided to try using a monochromatic under painting in raw umber to establish the range of tonal values, then applied color on top of that base.

The only real difference was that I arrived at the end point a lot quicker, where I diddle endlessly with details. I still ended up making some not -so-great compositional moves that were labor intensive to correct later on. But I have to let it go and move on.

Building with under painting has the disadvantage of losing spontaneity. Overall, it looked too hard edged and rigid to me- working on the smooth surface tends to yield very hard edged forms by nature.
I got into a real battle with the green floor mat again, trying to get the texture and values to work together. I am still finding green very difficult to work with for some reason.
I tried to resolve the hard edge feel by softening some edges with a worn out brush. I'm not certain why I am insisting on fighting this quality, when I should be exploiting it and using it to my advantage.

I like the effect using thin washes to build the aluminum screen door in the background, although the half circle shape is starting to bother me. It may be too strong.
I intended to use more linear texture using tools to scrape fine lines into the paint, but decided it wasn't working so well on this piece. The green floor mat was built up with numerous layers of greens and blues, which were pulled off and scraped off at various stages of drying. This is proving to be challenging, with a very small window of time to work the top layer of paint before it dries too much to manipulate. An extender would probably be useful here.