The Beginning is the End

Sometimes a painting simply doesn't work out. I started my Joseph Smith painting. I had my drawing all done and it was exactly how I wanted it. I transferred it to the canvas, finally had all of my reference material put together, and started painting. it started out well, so I was optimistic, but the longer I painted, the worse it got. My painting is at the point now that I want to...well...burn it. So I have decided to put it away for a couple of days, and try again later. I am not finished with this painting, it WILL be tackled and it WILL be painted to my liking. But for the moment, the beginning of this painting has now met its end. However, I did want to post a few images of the painting in progress so you can see a bit of my process.

This is my drawing. It took many days and many tears to get this drawing to look the way I wanted it too. When I create portraits or paintings that require very accurate drawing, I will draw it first in charcoal and then transfer the drawing to the canvas that I will paint on.

This is the beginning of the painting. It's not too bad and at this point, I honestly thought it was going to work out. But it was shortly after this point that things went downhill (fast!) and I lost my controlled, accurate brushwork.

This is an extremely difficult project for me to do. I don't have Joseph Smith (he died almost 200 years ago) to sit down in front of me. So I have used several different forms of reference material to collect all the information that I need in order to paint this properly. I am fairly confident that I know where I went wrong with this painting, so I should be able to start over again with much better results. In the meantime, I am working on a few other projects as well, and I will be posting more on those as I get into them.