The Commission Process Step 3-Practicing the Pour....:Shirley and Roger

So while I was patiently waiting for the custom panel to be built  (or maybe not so patiently), I thought I’d start “practicing” for the pour, or the first step after gessoing. I love and hate pours-they can be so fun, freeing, and immediately gratifying once you are done with the mixing and set up. It’s kind of like painting room-many times it takes longer to prepare the room than to actually paint it. This is definitely the case with pours.  They can be really really fun and beautiful with all sorts of different viscosities of paint and pigment branching and flowing into one another, or they can go really really badly, ending up with one big muddy runny mess.   Or you can leave come back the next morning and everything has migrated to a completely different part of the painting than where you put it initially. So pours are exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time. It is controlled to a certain extent- and the rest relies on instinct and gravity.  At any rate, the following is a video of me doing a pour.  It was preceded by three prior pours, which were less than stellar. Those could not be used due to the many obscenities uttered in the making :) 

I do want to stress that this is the very first FIRST step of many in the process of making a painting.  The next step requires a lot of sitting and staring, nail biting, fretting, and pacing deciding what to keep, what to delete, and what my next step will be.  That, however, would make less than stellar video, so I’ll just give you the fun part here: