I’ve been working on these two for the last few months. Reaons that have kept me from completing them:

1. Developing new mediums is a time sink. The watercolor crayons are really cool, but I’m not able to leverage them as well yet.

2. I’ve been working on an enormous tree in my basement with my new art team from my church. It’s going great, but it takes up 2-3 hours some weeks of my five hours of painting per week.

3. I’ve been making myself a picture bank of coffee with strangers.I have three new subjects to work with, and meeting up with them ended up being my painting time for that week.

These paintings:  The one on the left is a little fuzzy, I’ll be retaking that picture soon. I made that with watercolor crayons. It works, mostly, but the color saturation almost ran away with me. Very strong primary colors, which I like. The second one, the one on the left, is much much smaller. I like it more, and it’s done in the traditional way I usually paint. Both have helped me define to myself what direction I’m going with this. I really like the coffee with strangers project, and I’m starting to have a clear vision for what I’m trying to say with these paintings…sort of. I think the project is having an impact on my whole life, in that It’s a blow against my friend selection bias when I meet with someone who responded on craigslist. I meet only a certain range of people, and all the people I’ve met on Craigslist have been really interesting and well outside my traditional social circle.

As always, let me know what you think. Hopefully I’ll have a new post within the next two weeks.

-Nathan