I got this easel as a present and wanted to figure out a way to paint with it. I’ve been mostly laying my paintings down flat so I can stack up fat layers of paint without gravity, so I figured I’d work with gravity.

I wanted to have the colors worked out beforehand so I didn’t have to worry about mixing or pigments, so I bought three cheap tubes of acrylic: barn red, cherry red, and metallic gold.

I brushed out a weird rough surface, powdery from all the pigment I could manage since it’s cheap pigment and I’m probably going to toss it.

I had the idea to do little radiating tick marks like the sun… dark red, red, gold, with just enough heavy matte gel to make it stand out. But the tick marks just weren’t bold enough so I just dropped some big slabs with big palette knives.

I like it, in the end, but also am a little unsatisfied. Compositionally it doesn’t hold together for me… it’s clear it was improvised and I kept trying to improve it with one more line. In the end I imagine something much more sparse but as I painted the right balance kept eluding me. It’s very pretty and bold but has a very “painting 101” feel to it.

I think I may need to do a bit more compositional planning so I have a result I’m more happy with in the end. The painting itself is extremely fun, but these things are really built to last, so I want them to be something people would actually want to put up to enjoy, not just in remembrance of my weirdness. It feels good to practice and see what I can do, however.