Maybe yes, maybe no

I meant to have this finished by the end of June. I had a plan. The plan went awry. Basically, I was going take a trick I had done with Sky Pads 34 and apply it to #35. Major fail, at least in the sense that the idea was good but the manner of application was overkill. I ended up with the sprayed white paint, which was mostly turpentine and very little paint, settling in a puddle and actually lifting up dark colors that I had previously applied and running them in various unintended directions. I don’t have a photo of that. I had to wait over a week just for the turpentine to dry (evaporate, actually) before I could even think about what to do next.

The first thing I decided to do when things got dry enough was to restore some of the dark areas. It turned out that I like them better on the “lesser dark” repair. I also brightened up the color of the lily pads. The next question was what to do about the wimpy-looking original thin paint pour that was still intact on the entire upper half of the painting. It didn’t have anything that attracted the viewer’s eye. I got this brilliant idea to put a cloud-like coat of thin white paint on it with a mop-type brush. That didn’t work–I ended up dabbing off excess with a paper towel. And the dabbing in places went all the way down to the bare canvas.

This is starting to sound like a recipe for disaster, but I wasn’t about to give up. I found a rather stiff flat brush (left over from when I was in college, I think) that I could employ to shove some of the softer paint around until it kind of blended over the now bare canvas areas and somehow managed to suggest some cloud movement. So here’s what’s left:

Final, at least for the moment, version

Here’s its prior version, before all the disasters. Some may like it better, some may not. Hence the title of this post (maybe yes, maybe no)

In the meantime, Sky Pads 36 has had its background prepared for quite some time, and the drawing is on the canvas. So I’ll go there for a while and postpone the final vote on 35.