24 Variations Project | Part January

First month of 2017 completed! I finished my S K Y series for January and completed my first 24 Variations Project. What is a 24 Variations Project? Well let me tell you!

First, some background.

Some time last year, I started getting excited about the idea of painting a million (not literally) little paintings of the same thing for the sake of practicing the same concept over and over. One of the things that holds me back from really honing in on a design or concept is my impatience to just get something made. And I thought that if I created a project around the concept of painting several times over a design that I had previously painted, it would give me a specific goal to work towards, aka finishing the project, and I would get practice practicing. Does that make sense? My impatience keeps me from really practicing something well to build my skills and I wanted to attack that and do something fun at the same time. 

So I thought about that for a few months.

Then, out of the blue, an artist that I follow on Instagram @nava_waxman (she’s brilliant, go follow her) posted a photo on Instagram of 24 little paintings she’d made of the same basic abstract illustration. Her caption was 24 Variations. And that’s all I needed.

I had a number and a title and that’s where the project came from.

Since I’m already doing monthly themes, I figured the 24 Variations project could be a culmination of the same theme if I chose one of my simpler concepts I had already painted and did 24 small variations on it.

So I chose one of my favorites and most simple from January, the flock of birds against a stormy sky, and painted 24 variations of them. Each painting is small–about 3.5″x5″.

And that’s it! Very simple and still challenging. This first round of the project, though fun, definitely stretched my patience with all those tiny birds. But it was also very meditative and I’m excited to do this again and continue growing my love for the process of making art instead of always wanting to just get to the finish line.

I still need to figure out what exactly to do with them. I’ll probably sell them as hand painted notecards in my Etsy shop but we’ll see. I’d love to use some of them as a giveaway on Instagram. Stay tuned!

Thanks for reading, as always! If you have any ideas for my monthly themes project or what else I can do with these pieces from my 24 Variations project, please share them with me!

Tschüss!