A Day to Remember!

This is a historic day, will be watching the inauguration pretty soon . . . it's funny, only three years ago I was in New York meeting with art directors and no one in New York seemed to know who Obama was? Everyone was talking as if Hillary was going to be the next president, the buzz was everywhere. Being from Chicago, I knew who Obama was . . . at the time he was a new Senator and there was talk of him "possibly" running for President. I remember every once in a while for the sake of conversation with the A.D.'s I would ask . . . "What about Obama, Chicago thinks he has a shot"? And every time the response would be . . . "Who's Obama?" This was only three years ago. I also remember the day Obama became Senator, it was the first I ever heard of him, it was a big deal then for him to be Senator . . . interesting how in just a few years time, a lot can happen.

OK, to my painting.

As you most likely can tell, this painting was done from my quick sketch on the previous post. I think it's interesting, the idea of a "sketch" vs. a "drawing". The way I look at "sketching" may be a bit different then others, but I don't really think so? For me sketching is like taking notes, scratching down information in prep for a "final work". "Drawing" would be taking a "sketch" to a final tight drawing . . .

Like my Obama sketch, a sketch sometimes only needs to enough of the "right" information for me to be able to take it to the next level, being a finished drawing or painting. I knew that my Obama sketch wasn't exact and it wasn't what it could be, but that's OK, because I also feel it's important to share my process even if it's in pieces here and there.

Sometimes a sketch can be a final piece of art, but for me, most of my sketches are practice, a place for me to experiment and try new things . . . and not everything is up to par with what I'd like to label as a "Seiler". But that's what sketching is for right?

I decided I would save my steps or at least a few of the steps while working on this painting. I started yesterday afternoon and spent a couple hours this morning on it, in total, about 6 hours of painting. My first intentions was to paint loose and paint enough for me to get the likeness the way I had intended. I ended up painting a lot longer and decided to do something more finished.

You can see from the steps that I started off by painting my entire canvas with an orangy-brown and then from there started putting color down . . . mostly greens and yellows.