I am not one to think myself perfect. On the contrary, I am far from it. Even after all the years of painting, I makes mistakes. Or, should I say, I forget to finish things in my work.
After staring at a canvas for a length of time, in such close quarters, I sometimes just don’t see things I have been staring at for hours and hours. It sometimes takes me calling them finished, scanning and then, uploading them, and seeing them on the screen to finally go, “Uh-oh! Missed a spot!” That’s what I did in this one. Actually two places, but one I caught. It was minor I went ahead and uploaded it that way. Nobody can tell.
In the past, I did some pretty large, and intricate paintings. My biggest oops was way back when. I had taken a painting to the gallery, varnished and framed. It was where I was actually working at the time. Don’t stop me if you’ve already heard this. I am already hard pressed to come up with a story to fill this page with occasionally. But as I showed the painting to a potential collector, I noticed that among the many, many children running happily across the landscape, there was an empty pair of pants running along with them. That was long before I figured out that it was so much easier to paint the figures and then dress them. As I recall, the client bought the painting but I took it home to finish it off before I shipped it to her. So it ended well.
With the tiny otter series I have been doing lately, I generally don’t miss anything. But this one is bigger that most of them and I did overlook it. So I’ll fix it today before I varish it. And get it to the gallery soon. See if you can spot it. Just for fun. No, I won’t say what it is. It may be glaring only to me. If you get stuck, let me know.
And here is is done. See if you can spot it now.