Painting for starters. Or well... me.

You might have read the post where I said I'm a great cook. Well, I suck at painting. I'm not sure if you know that feeling of really wanting to do something. Like singing when your voice sounds like nails on a black board.

For me, that's painting. In my head, I have these great pictures. I know exactly how they should look. They're beautiful, rich of colour, have all these hidden little secrets. And then I start to paint. And normally, it turns out like this.

Translation: "I'm a pubic hair and I'm sitting in your fridge. Happy eating!" I don't always draw pubic hair in a fridge, this just happened to be the first thing I saw when I opened the fridge in my new apartment.

 Mind you, that's one of my better pictures. Nevertheless, I can't stop trying. I'm nowhere near perfect, but it's fun and the Doctor likes them. Or pretends to. Either way, I get to hang them from the wall and feel all fancy.

Since I don't have a huge budget and no collection of paint, I have to start out simple. Which is better anyways, because there'd be a huge mess of colours if I had dozens of paint cans. This time, the Doctor was nice and bought me some canvas and paint; ochre, brown and black.

I had a specific thing in mind so these colours weren't coincidence, I actually asked for them. I saw this picture, really simple, of four flowers on an ochre background. And I figured I could try that and see if I manage to make it look nice.

I started out with ochre, naturally. As you can see inthe picture above, the ochre looks really bright, so I only used a bit of water to make it a little thinner. Unfortunately, as it began to dry, it grew darker and darker. I went with it - what else could I have done. But since learning from mistakes is always the best kind of learning: Try your paint before you use it if you haven't used it before. See how it turns out once it's dry! Especially if it's cheap paint. Nothing against cheap paint, but it can be a bit of a surprise.

While the original painting looked a bit like canvas, this doesn't. But oh well, can't change that now! (Especially since the only white paint I have is white wood stain) I let it dry completely over night and the next day, I started distressing it a bit. I wanted it to lose some of its colour as well as look a bit old and used. I used medium rough sandpaper that I found in the Doctor's secret cabinet of wonderful things like drills and sandpaper. It's not that wonderful but it does come in handy now and then.

I managed to scrape off a bit of the top layer of the paint and I made sure to scrub extra hard over the edges and in the middle, where the wood sits against the canvas. (Not all canvas have that, but this one was so big it needed it). For a few more of those white lines, I used an old book, held it on the back of the canvas and then sandpapered over its edge.

It's still a bit dark, but doesn't look as weirdly yellowish anymore. So that was a good thing. I actually managed to sandpaper a little hole into it, luckily nobody's noticed yet. When I was done with that, I mixed the colour for the flowers. I wanted them to be really dark brown, almost black, so that's what I used the other two colours of my extraordinarily huge collection for.

Now, I've often made the mistake to mix a colour that I use for a rather big portion of the picture and then not mix enough, so I figured "better mix more this time." Unfortunately, four flowers don't need that much paint, so I ended up with way too much. I guess this kind of thing comes with experience.

My flowers, as you can see in the final picture, have dots as petals. I wanted to see what to do them best with. I used the eraser end of a pencil. It worked nicely, but I wanted to see what else would be useful. I used a paintbrush, but it didn't look the way I wanted it to look. I'm also not patient enough to draw all that, I'm the instant-result kind of person. I used body parts! Even my nose. Most of the petals were made by my index finger though. It worked, it's a bit annoying to get rid of the paint under your finger nail though. Personally, I like the finger print that comes with it in some of the petals. It just adds a bit of personality and texture to the picture, in my opinion.

That's the result. The lines aren't perfect, I used too much paint in the beginning so there's a bit of a blob there and they look a little shaky because my back and my arms were tired from drawing on the ground, but the overall result isn't too bad, in my opinion. You've seen the other picture I drew in the beginning, so I think there's at least -some- improvement visible here.

The Doctor hung it on the wall above our couch. I think he even used a new nail with the sole purpose of holding my picture up, which makes me proud, because I just hung it from one of the bazillion nails that are already stuck in our walls next to something else so it was really askew.

And now it hangs there, my first "real" painting that doesn't look as if I'd fallen into a huge trash can filled with old paint and then rolled around on some canvas. It will never hang in a gallery, but it was fun to make and I definitely learned from it. I already bought new canvas today.

Painting will most likely never be my #1 thing to do, but it's a nice change.