I lived long enough with a super beige painting in my living room and I knew it was time to spice it up. I loved how my initial chrome-paint experiment The Second Seal went, and wanted to expand that into a large-format painting and correct the mistakes of my first latex mold painting.

I made two new latex molds specifically for this painting and I think it’s safe to say that I’ve been working on this painting for a long time. Every part of this process takes a lot of waiting now. The latex molds take a couple of weeks apiece, the drying of the shapes takes two weeks, and now I’m learning I need to do a lot of correction and touch up work if I want the crisp effect I’m looking for.

The chrome paint continues to punch above its weight and I’m learning my lesson that using colors out of the bottle is the way to go. That way I have a good vivid color and matching it for touch-ups or other problems is easy.

I really fought against impatience and shortcuts throughout this process. I wanted a good result and had to do many rounds of correction, cleanup, and waiting for everything to dry completely.

I like the original vision of using silver and gold but I sure wish the gold paint with gloss gel media was anywhere near as shiny as the custom chrome paint from Culture Hustle. The chrome paint is the only non-acrylic paint I work with and the cleanup process is ten times as painful. Needing to worry about using a solvent and getting paint on things is tough.

So much of painting is the setup and cleanup. I’m trying to learn to enjoy those parts of the process as much as the actual applying of paint since they take up the lion’s share of the time spent “painting”.

It’s funny how much of the time I solidly feel like some kind of “outsider artist” genuine painter and how much time I feel like a total pretender hobbyist. I think anyone who paints must struggle with that.

Anyway, I’m proud of this painting. It’s sparse, bold, perhaps more than a little ugly, and I could imagine it selling or hanging in a gallery.