I haven’t oil painted in years. It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s just that in this digital age, clients have no problem asking me to make revisions which would otherwise be impossible if I were executing a project in oil paints. Once a painting is done, it’s done. If a client asked me to make a major revision, I’d have to start completely over.
Oh, sure, I could get the client to approve a design before I begin the actual painting, which is how I used to work. However, clients seem to believe that they can still ask for revisions even after they’ve approved a design. That’s because they’ve become used to the ease by which changes can now be made to an existing image. Of course, that assumes the image was digitally created in the first place. I suppose I could always scan a painting and come back and edit later if changes are necessary, but that leaves me with a physical painting that, in my mind, no longer represents the finished work.
Another aspect of no longer working in traditional media is that I no longer have original artwork to hang. Although, because I still begin a digital painting by creating the drawing on paper, I do have an original drawing, but that’s not as nice as having a painting. So that’s a big drawback of digital art, in my mind.
In any case, the particular oil painting (sans the added verbiage) which you see in this post hangs in our kitchen. I didn’t create it for a client. I painted it with the intent of creating a series of caricature paintings to try to sell through a gallery. I only managed to finish three before I had to move on to other projects, so now two of them just hang in our home. I’d like to eventually get back to oil painting some day, even if it’s just for my own pleasure.
So how many of you still create your commercial work in traditional paint media? Anyone?
Frank Grau Illustration 