It just wasn't working

Painting by Vicky Christensen, acrylic on 14 x 18 inch canvas 

Yesterday was one of those days. I started painting with an idea in my head but things didn't go as planned.

If you can believe it, I started with the intention of painting an abstract version of a colorful village, one of those you see in a travel brochure for coastal Italy, for example. Once I got into it, it just wasn't working for me.

So I started to layer more paint and got a very colorful canvas. I started scraping and painting circles. It looked like this after a while:

I liked the colors but it still wasn't doing anything for me. Since the top layers of the paint was still wet (I was using Golden OPEN paint and medium) I started scraping away paint. It might have been a rash decision  (word of advice, don't make important decisions at 1:00 AM). But what the heck, it's only a painting.

Today I decided to follow the texture that was left on the canvas and started glazing on color. It ended up looking like one of those mosaics that people make from pieces of colored glass. I decided to use a mix of manganese blue hue and titanium white for the 'grout' highlights.