Before putting the paint down, I made a bunch of stencils after ‘lightboxing’ the canvas by holding it in front of our window. Entertainingly enough, the police were searching a car on the street while I was working on it. Keep your taxes paid, citizens!
Normally I’ll do a background with a palette knife, due to the texture it will give me, but again, this painting was about going outside of my comfort zone, out of the box, or out of whatever other pop psychology terms apply here. I squeezed the paint directly onto the surface. A little red here, some blue there, some brown on the side, then mixed them together with a brush, letting the colors do whatever they decided to do.
This photo’s a little cruddy, but the vibrant colors started to inspire me on where I was going.