Hard to change gear

Having spent the last week thinking about the painting that I'll be exchanging with Artist X on Thursday (in between all the other business/admin stuff I was doing), I finally put brush to paper today. And it went REALLY well. So far. It's probably the most smoothly going piece I've ever worked on. Although I am right now thinking about backing out the last thing I did before I quit for the night.

I guess all that thinking pays off. Although quite often I find too much thinking is not necessarily good—I get it figured out to a point that I no longer feel the need to work on the piece...it's finished, in my head. Again, I can't show pictures at this point yet, but it does have a title—Trip. (The last piece from this collaboration was Prosperity Soup to Be Eaten in the Dark.)

Trip is being painting on paper already mounted on gesso'ed board, and it's behaving differently than just plain paper unmounted. I used gel medium to mount the paper to board, and the medium must've infiltrated enough of the paper to make the water-based gouache behave differently. I'm liking what it's doing though, it adds a nice texture that almost makes it look like an aquatint in places. The pigment is also lifting off much easier than when the paper is unmounted, which will take a bit of getting used to.

But anyhow, now that I'm all into the painting and everything, I'm gonna have to get into book making gear for this week. I'm meeting with a family tomorrow about a Relay Replay book, I'll be meeting with my critique group about starting a collaborative book project, I'm picking up supplies for a class I'm teaching on Friday, and, of course, teaching on Friday.