For a while now I’ve been thinking about doing a painting that was specific for the times we’re living in now. At first, I thought about doing one with a roll of toilet paper, like one of those Andy Warhol Campbell’s soup can paintings. Then I thought about doing one with TP and hand sanitizer too. But then, after thinking about it for a while, I decided that nobody would probably want to hang those on their wall. While cleaning up my office, I came across a postcard of a dock, and then, the idea hit! I would paint a photo of a dock and put a little roll of TP at the end of it! My plan was also to auction the painting off on Facebook and donate all of the proceeds to SILO, where I have donated about 40 notecards so far.
I looked around on the internet and found a photo of a dock that I liked, and that would be a challenge for me to paint. I had a canvas ready so, off I went!
First, here’s the photo:
Here’s the first pass:
The first pass felt pretty flat, but, it was a start. I also realized that I needed to make the close end of the dock wider.
This is a little better but the close end of the dock still needed to be wider.
Getting there, but the sky wasn’t dark enough.
Sky is better now but the dock needs some cleanup:
These next few all look the same, but I think there are probably some very small nuances. I took a lot of photos while I was working on this because sometimes you can more easily see fixes that need to be made looking at a photo rather than the real thing.
Added the roll of TP and started adding lines to show the separate boards on the dock.
In the above shot, I felt like the lines were a little too strong so I ‘took them back’ a little bit.
And here’s the finished product. Added some little light reflections in the bottom right area. I’m pretty pleased with how this turned out.
The Facebook auction is currently happening. I’ll update this post when the bidding is closed and add what the final bid was. Talk soon!
UPDATE: The highest bid for the painting was $250! The bidder directly donated an extra $100 to the charity. Another person requested the same painting with the TP moved, matching the $250. I decided to add my own $100 donation to match the other extra one. So, we donated a total of $700 to SILO of Oxford PA!
ANOTHER UPDATE: I was talking to one of the bidders after the auction was over, and he was mad that he didn’t win the painting. So, I told him if he matched the winning bid, I would do a painting for him. And he did! We donated to Hope for Families in Avondale – there were several families (28) displaced from their low-income homes due to major flooding. We raised a total of $950 to help our local communities!!
ANOTHER UPDATE 2: Here are all 3 finished paintings – I am planning to do some smaller more impressionistic stuff to also auction off. Stay tuned!
