Junipero Serra

If you have ever been to my state of California, and been lucky enough to travel to Santa Barbara, and have taken a trip to the Santa Barbara Mission, then you have probably seen Junipero Serra.   For the rest of you, just look to the left.  Junipero was instrumental in founding the Mission and also in creating the El Camino Real, the road up and down California that connected all the missions.

So, I'm trying very hard to paint with larger strokes, at least in the initial stages of the painting, and keeping thing much wetter when I paint.  I've also been keeping my paper up on my easel, instead of nearly level, which is how I normally paint.

Beginning with basic colors and washes and working my way to progressively smaller brushes and finer strokes, I'm hoping to create an image o f the picture I'm painting, not necessarily a reproduction of it.  I try to think of it as if I am looking through a filter with many layers of gauze or hose on it.  Each time I paint a layer on my painting I can take a layer off the filter.  Therefore when I start things are quite fuzzy and I can't make out any detail.  After several layers, the details come more into focus.  As long as I stop painting before all the layer have been taken off the filter, I can't paint the fine details.  Thats what I tried to do with this.

You can easily see the outline and if you allow your mind, you can see details like his fingers and his nose, but if you look closely, you'll see that I didn't actually paint any of those.

Well, I had fun with this, but think I got a little carried away with it.  Enjoy.