SirGunky

What do you do when you feel like you really messed up on a piece?

I'm currently working on the third Star Wars "saint" painting. I am having great difficulty getting the face just right, and I made some kind of mistake during the tracing which screwed up the angle of a long line so that it doesn't match up as it should. I've spent hours and hours on the face, and it's not getting any better, so finally I scrubbed it with turpenol and a paper towel. It's bad enough, though, that I now hate the whole thing and want to set it on fire and start over fresh. I can reuse the canvas for a landscape or something when it eventually dries.

Man...

In terms of skill, I usually think I'm pretty good. Not great, certainly, and not yet where I want to be, but good enough that I feel encouraged to continue when I look at my finished pieces.

Then I look around at some of the stuff here. And it makes me realize how far I still need to go until I am where I want to be. Some of you guys... holy hell. Phenomenal. You've hit that part of the curve I'm still aiming for, and you make it look way, way easier than it is. Seriously, take a browse through my Favourites folder. Mind = blown.

But I'm not completely discouraged. I've only been painting seriously since July 2012. Experiments seem to be paying off. Incremental improvements can be seen. Mastery doesn't come right away, it comes from failing differently time after time. Eventually, if you learn from each failure, you find that one thing that works exactly the way you wanted it to.

I want to cry, but I'm not sure if it's out of joy or sorrow.

The plan is to make Episode VII for a 2015 release. In 2008, Lucas said straight up that neither he nor anyone else would ever make another Star Wars movie, period. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_War…

"In an interview published in Total Film in May 2008, Lucas also ruled out anybody else ever making the sequel trilogy (or other future Star Wars features). Asked if he was happy for new Star Wars tales to be told after he was gone, Lucas replied: "I've left pretty explicit instructions for there not to be any more features. There will definitely be no Episodes VII–IX. That's because there isn't any story. I mean, I never thought of anything. And now there have been novels about the events after Episode VI, which isn't at all what I would have done with it. The Star Wars story is really the tragedy of Darth Vader. That is the story. Once Vader dies, he doesn't come back to life, the Emperor doesn't get cloned and Luke doesn't get married..."[34] The phenomenon of the Star Wars 'Expanded Universe', with stories told in novels, comic books and other media, also appears to have been a factor in Lucas seeing no need to produce a sequel trilogy: "Whatever it is that happens afterward, that isn't the core Star Wars story that I like to tell," he said in 2008. "There really isn't any story to tell there. It's been covered in the books and video games and comic books, which are things I think are incredibly creative but that I don't really have anything to do with other than being the person who built the sandbox they're playing in."[29]"

So instead of THAT, he went ahead and sold his "sandbox" to Disney, saying that he wants the story to grow and that he feels it's time to pass the torch to a new generation of filmmakers, et cetera. This can go one of two ways, as far as I see:
1) Disney will take this "sandbox" and add soft plastic Jar-Jar Binks-shaped bumpers to the corners and pink gluten-free safety-sand
2) Disney passes the production down to the same subsidiary that makes the Marvel movies and creates something:
     a) epic and awesome because they got a great writer, director and cast and crew
     b) completely soulless because they got someone like the Transformers guy and a childhood-raping writer who thought that the series needed a "reboot" and a bunch of pretty-but-empty A-lister KStew/Abercrombie & Fitch clones, but they spend 80 million dollars on wrangling in the Pixar AND ILM guys to make exploding CGI robots with lightsabers and Force powers, so it's way flashy.

Either way, Lucas will get some kind of "original story by" or "co-executive producer" credit, and will be rich enough to start his own space program and retire on the moon.

I'm considering a switch from oils to acrylics. Maybe not a complete switch, but like.. an addition?

I enjoy working with oils. I like it for painting people, where tiny, subtle gradations in skin tone require careful blending. I make lots of tiny little corrections, and a long drying time helps with that.

But for the landscapes I've been doing, I get impatient, and that often ends up having a detrimental effect on the work. I get an idea and I want to do it RIGHTNOW rather than wait 2 days for the linseed oil to polymerize and the turpentine to evaporate. So I'm considering switching to acrylics for the landscape stuff, and sticking with oils for portraits and whatnot.

For anyone reading this who has worked with both mediums, or who has particular expertise in one or the other, I have some questions:
1) How do acrylics compare to oils, cost-wise? I know it would be cheaper in terms of thinners and cleanup, but how do the actual paints compare, costwise?
2) How well would they work for the "wet on wet" technique as espoused by PBS instructors? Those guys use oils, but with the stuff they are doing with it, it looks like acrylics would do just as good a job.
3) Can acrylics be made to look like oils? To me, it always seems as if there is a marked difference in technique or something... or maybe acrylics lose vibrancy when they dry? I don't know what it is.
4) Any other suggestions / recommendations / things I should know about?

Related, but not really: I bought some new paints and have been testing them out.
- Winton Sap Green is a great colour for trees and grass and whatnot, but I end up using a LOT of it. Way more than any of the other colours.
- Winton Flesh Tint is pretty awful. It's the colour of ham. Which is a kind of flesh, I suppose, but not the kind I'm trying to paint. Not recommended - a bit of Burnt Sienna, Yellow Ochre, Burnt Umber and loads of Titanium White looks a lot more natural, and can be tinted with reds for pink bits.
- Winsor & Newton Artist Oil Yellow Ochre is nearly too thick to use. It's physically difficult to squeeze out of the tube, and it's so thick it doesn't want to mix. I don't know if I got a partially-dried-out tube or if they just come that way all the time.

Hey, I found the list thing at the bottom! Yay me!

By the way, if anyone likes my original paintings and wants to see the reference images, let me know. I won't post them here for a variety of reasons, but I will share them with anyone interested in learning more about the artistic process, or who wants to re-use them as stock for their own works. That's for original, non-commissioned work only - commissioned works are proprietary, and the "fan art" resource images were found on the internet.

Er, I should point out that my original works may not be used or reproduced without permission. Download 'em for personal use, buy the prints, but don't post the pictures anywhere without giving proper credit.