Getting closer

I'm almost finished with Painting. Basically the only thing that I have left to do is show up to the critique. And then clean out my stuff on Sunday and collect my paintings. I finished my final painting today, and it really didn't take nearly as long as I thought it would. Probably because there wasn't a whole lot of detail work. I mean, I could have made it photorealistic and I half intended to, but when I had my first couple layers of paint on and the trees painted in, I decided that I liked how it looked as it was. And then once I painted in all of the reflections, my mind was made up. The only really detailed elements were the frog in the foreground (which looks amazing and didn't actually take me as long to paint as I thought it would) and there's a turtle basking on a log that is kind of detailed but it's so small that there wasn't much detail area to cover. I decided to leave out the dragonfly (which probably would have taken a few hours to paint) because of focusing issues. It would be "zoomed in" but the background wouldn't be blurry, and since a painting is 2D the viewer's eye wouldn't make the background blurry just by looking at the dragonfly so I think it would have ruined the painting. And I'm sure that I could have worked on it more (I spent like 7 hours outside of class on it, and I suspected it would take me between 12 and 16), but even yesterday I kept looking at it and thinking to myself "this is finished." Even without the frog and the completed reflection of the weeping willow it looked done. But I didn't want to leave the frog out, and I knew that it would look better with the improved willow reflection, so I went back in today. I'm quite pleased with it. Even moreso since it took me so little time, and I actually enjoyed painting it.

So basically now I just have my GIS final project which I present on Wednesday and need to have the paper turned in by next Monday, the Vertebrate Zoology paper that's due tomorrow and just needs to be edited (hopefully not too much, as I haven't seen the sections that Liz and Meg wrote), the plant collection, and the finals in Vertebrate Zoology and Plant Systematics (which will be on the same day, next Monday). So my massive end of semester workload suddenly seems a lot lighter, and a huge part of that is because the painting went so well. Because in theory I could have spent the rest of today and most of tomorrow on that painting if I had to, and then I would have hated it and been quite pressed for time on GIS.

And anyone who actually enjoyed reading this entry is crazy because it's boring. Honestly now, who really cares about my last undergraduate assignments? Well, perhaps I'll look back on this some day and enjoy reading about it. Who knows. But probably not.

Ok, I'm done procrastinating now.