👨🏻‍🍳🥘 "Everybody's Fed." 🐻 sharing creative process

👑Part of the 'With You' series🎨

Piece Title: Everybody's Fed
Size: 24x36"
Materials: oil on canvas

completed September 2024

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👨🏻‍🍳 painting background, thoughts & process work

hello! It feels like it's been a little while since I did a write up for a painting to share with you all! I'm really excited to share this one. I started this piece in June 2024 and completed it in early September. So it took me 3 months! (off-work hours) this one came after finishing Resonances, so I was excited to take another step into making an even larger piece! I'm working on an even larger sizes now (I am writing this from march 31, 2025) but at the time of working on this- I was really nervous and feeling confronted with the scale! I felt like any mistake I made would be more in my face the larger I worked, and it took me some time to get used to.

one constant in our household is my husband always cooking and feeding the house 🐻 his love language has always been to caretake and nurture and cook! so the bear in my series has the same temperament 💛
I wanted to paint a large piece that captured that memory and feeling, so that's where this piece started! just a simple desire to paint the bear doing one of the things he is always doing :')

first thumbnail sketches from sketchbook
 exploring base colors



I remember I sketched these thumbnails in my then sketchbook and was struggling with the paper quality with my waterbased paints (the paper kept deteriorating.. which made it hard to continue mapping things out on the page) so I took a photo and moved to procreate to continue figuring out ideas

beginning brainstorming piece colors on ipad
 further mock up in procreate

for these larger pieces I've been learning that the more planning I do ahead of time, the more comfortable I feel painting on the canvas.. and I found that it's been easier for me to map out my lighting and color palette intentions digitally sometimes because going from a gouache or watercolor sketch on paper to trying to blow the image up and flesh out the details in oil paint on canvas proved to be a headache, especially when starting off on uncertain footing. I pulled up my ipad a handful of times during the making of this piece, because I would find myself getting stuck and needing a impermanent way to figure out next steps and try stuff. the luxury of toggling layers, the undo button- etc.

 exploring lighting in procreate



this was a good place for me to move ahead on the physical thing- but eventually I needed to figure out more finalizing details and again, I felt a bit nervous of messing it up so I went back to the ipad to work things out. (see below)

midway (getting unstuck) digital mock up

 

it was a lot of fun for me to do this painting and also honestly- really pivotal!
After Resonances, I felt a shift in my mark making- I really liked using a flat edge and making more blocky, blendy and kinda impressionisty strokes, and I knew that I wanted to carry more of that into this one. it was more fun for me than to paint clean graphic lines and I could add more volume and texture. it's really exciting to see these gradual changes in my work and have them show up physically in front of me.

the title "Everybody's Fed" came at the tail end of painting the piece. I was sitting at the kitchen table chatting with my mother in law. my husband was bumbling around in the kitchen. He had just chopped down her food for her on her plate, and just put his and my dinner down on the table in front of me. Our cat was meowing for our attention, trying to get heard over the sounds of him putting pots and pans into the sink. He placed our cat's dish on the floor finally in front of her little area and then walked out of the kitchen walkway, dusting his big paws off and said, relieved; "Ok! Everybody's Fed." 👏😮‍💨
and when I heard that I was super delighted- "that's the title!!"
it's really fun when a title comes to me like that. it doesn't always happen, so it's extra special when it does

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💌 This month's happy mail looks like this!

A postcard and two stickers. I'm not sure what happened in the process of printing but I didn't love how the colors came out on the bear sticker.. sorry about that! colors looked fine on the little princess though.


thanks for watching and supporting

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all my love
💛
LITTLELIST