Starting Something New, 8/28/25
August 28, 2025
What exactly happens in the painter’s studio every day? As a self taught painter, it’s not necessarily easy to find out, especially since the painter’s practice is by necessity quite solitary. Over the past few years I’ve been gradually scaling my practice from small illustrations, to comics, to small paintings, now to large paintings, and dipping a toe into animation. I have taken a few classes here and there, but most of the knowledge/technique I have learned about painting has come from Youtube, working artist’s personal blogs, artist autobiographies, and of course, through sustained exploration and engagement with art-making materials. Anyway, all this is to say that I am starting this little online studio log so that I might contribute to that body of knowledge. I figure I can also keep track of things that I’ve learned and where/how I learned them. Honestly, I am not sure what use this will be to myself or anyone, but it feels worth doing. So, for as long as I can stand it, I’ll write a log of exactly what happens each day in my studio, in as much detail as I feel like providing. That being said, I actually did not do any painting today. I spent roughly three hours working in the studio on various endeavours..
I got to the studio around 10 A.M. this morning. The first thing I did was set a 15 minute timer to work on a screenplay version of Frog Ephemera. The goal is to eventually animate the story, but I have found it overwhelming to start with animation first in mind. That’s why I’m beginning by translating the trilogy into a unified script. Sorting the story out first. I work on it for exactly 15 minutes every day, as soon as I get to the studio, and that’s it. This idea of spending only 15 minutes a day on a large, intimidating project was given to me by Abeer Hoque during a workshop I took with her at the beginning of this month. I used to pressure myself to just work for as long as I possibly could on one thing per day, but this method has been working quite well for me. In just 2 weeks, 15 minutes a day, I have managed to string together 12 pages of a Frog Ephemera screenplay. It has not taken any time away from my other projects or intruded on my life at all. In fact, it’s a nice, low-pressure daily warmup. Whenever I feel like it, I use the 15 min rule for another creative writing experiment I’ve been playing with. I’ll get to that another time.
After my 15 minutes was up, I worked on sending out an email which I had been putting off about a potential commission for a painting. This will be my first painting commission ever, so I really want to do a great job with it. In the past I’ve been anxious about accepting commissions, because I didn’t want to disappoint anyone. Finally, I feel confident enough in my abilities to take something like this on. So, it took me a little while to compose this email, maybe 15-20 minutes. I made sure to include information about process, inspiration, examples of style, potential size of the final work, and a price quote. I was nervous about putting a price on my work. I’ve only sold paintings once before, and I really undervalued them, but I did not want to overvalue, either. Of course, for me the paintings are priceless. It took me a long time to finally settle on the number I sent the client. They ended up offering a little more, anyway! It all felt very exciting and professional.
Then, I started working on a rotoscope animation. This is a technique I have been wanting to try for a while, where you basically use a video and trace over the resulting images frame by frame. I’m interested in seeing how much I can exaggerate the realistic motion which results from this method of animation. I also need to make some kind of video “introducing myself and sharing my interests as an artist” for the upcoming Skowhegan application (which opens in September,) so I’ve been thinking about different ways I might do that. I’m thinking I might do some kind of buddy cop/mystery storyline for the video. Anyway, I didn’t get too far with the rotoscoping experiment today. First, I set up my iPad on a chair and filmed myself + Karla walking in and out of the door to the studio. Then, I ran it through an online video to JPEG converter and printed out the resulting frames. That took really long because there were like over a hundred frames, plus the frames printed all out of order, so I had to go through and lay them out on the ground in the order which made most sense to me. I numbered them and picked them all up, then bound them with a paper clip. All in all this process took me about an hour and a half. Somewhere along the way I took a short break to walk Karla and get a can of Yerba Mate.
Then, finally, I came up with the idea of making a log of what I do in the studio every day, and I sat down and typed this up. And then I went home and did the dishes. And now here we are!
So, to recap, my 3 studio hours today were spent:
Working on a Frog Ephemera script
Gathering my thoughts + sending an email about commission work
Beginning a rotoscope animation project
Starting this new blog
Not too shabby! I feel good about it. See you tomorrow!
–Finn
