Peter Mohrbacher

Pisces - Sketch Phase

Added 2018-01-31 01:02:31 +0000 UTC

I'm posting the entire progress of this piece all at once this month. Despite having worked on it over the course of the last 2-3 weeks, I've not been leaving my usual updates. Leading up to this deadline, I've been considering what I would say about the lack of communication but there's not much to say.

Depression is a hell of a thing. Aside from working on this painting, I've been working on that. Part of the process of dealing with my mental health has been focusing more on interacting with people in my life at the expense of interacting as much on the Internet. If there is something more meaningful to write about the subject, I will. In the mean time, don't worry, things are going well.

Leading up to this sketch, I started doing a lot more drawing. With self imposed restrictions on smart phone use, my sketchbook started getting more use. In addition to giving this piece a couple more attempts on paper than normal, I spent more time with it than a lot of the sketches I make before painting.

Most of the time I spend drawing is spent picking away at little bits of the figure at random rather than developing it in a focused way. That proved to be a theme for this whole piece and part of why I didn't end up posting updates earlier. At every point up until the final detail pass, I kept expecting that I would possibly dump this version of the image in favor of one of the other sketches. That uncertainty left me not wanting to show a version of the painting that might get overwritten. The one saving grace of working on a piece that I'm so uncertain of, is that those pieces tend to go really well in the end. A lack on confidence in my ability to finish something, drives me to make thoughtful choices.