What To Do With A Painting Gone Wrong.
I’ve been witnessing what a few artists are doing with a painting gone wrong on Instagram. Some are cutting their paintings up and reworking them into a collage. So much better! It changes the perspective and they don’t feel so bad about a bad painting because now it’s a completely different thing.
I finished a watercolor of fingers of sunlight stretching across river water directed towards an interesting arrangement of sand, rocks, and pebbles. In the end, wasn’t working. Not for me, not for my partner. Instead of pitching the painting altogether, I did something I hadn’t done before. I created a paper house out of it. Like my fellow IG artists found out, this was so much better and way more fun.
Just for yucks, I thought I would post a series of process photos on how I went about it. This is way before I discovered that there are tons of templates and kits for making paper houses online, by the way. All you have to do is google “paper houses.”
Almost there! Paper house ready for the roof.
So How Did It Go?
Creating a little paper house was a lot easier than I had imagined. The key was to first build a prototype using paper from my printer. You know, the letter-sized stuff that comes in reams purchased at Office Max. Nothing special. That’s where I worked out all the snags, like where to put the tabs to glue the roof down and what size it could be. Given my watercolor painting was 18” high (and 12” wide), I could build a paper house that was 4.5” square with plenty left over to add the flooring and most importantly, the roof.
It helped to have a bone scorer used to score sheets of paper in bookmaking. The watercolor paper is 300 lb. (that’s thick) hotpress Fabriano. Even with scoring the folds with fervor, (I could have started it on fire!), the paper still creases unevenly and makes for a cracked appearance. No matter. I wasn’t going for perfection. Everything else lined up thanks to the “measure twice, cut once” adage.
Your Turn.
What do you do with a painting you feel has gone wrong or isn’t working? I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas.
Thanks for reading. Till we meet again, keep the creative spirit, be kind to the earth and especially be kind to yourself.
