When I decided a very long time ago that illustration was what I was heading for (after deciding that fashion was (and still is) for idiots, and to be a fine artist I would have to a. think of something to paint and b. learn how not to get withering "you don't know what the fuck you are talking about" looks from the head of the art department.... and after it was strongly pointed out to me that the fact that I kept illustrating things probably meant that I was an illustrator), I quickly limited myself to the illustrator's media. That is, anything that dries quickly.

So, ink, watercolour, acrylics and electric paints were what I used for the next twenty years. They're all lovely in their own ways, but, apart from electric paint which distinctly lacks SOMETHING of real worldness, they all have a kind of inbuilt tension to them... the knowledge that if you muck up a part of your drawing, it's hard or impossible to bring it back unless you do it immediately; watercolour is absorbed by the paper almost immediately; acrylics dry pretty quickly, and also build up texture, so covering up over dried paint is horrid; ink is ink is ink and sticks and stains. So if you go wrong, a lot of the time you have to start again. What with deadlines and the sheer boredom of doing something again that can be rather stressy.

Of course, that same tension often adds something amazing and intangible to many illustrators' work... but sometimes a girl wants to sit and mull it over, paint and repaint and touch up and glaze and rub out and fiddle about, which is why electric paint is so good.

Electric paint means I can rework till my electric pen bleeds without having worn out any paper or spent any money on paints. Electric paint also means that if my hard drive decides to suddenly die for no reason half way through it, I have lost my painting. It occurred to me the other day when that did happen, that maybe this was karma telling me that maybe I should try REAL oil painting. So I went out and bought a few tubes of paint. And. Oh. Dear... I've found ANOTHER thing that I enjoy doing too much, that's time consuming and takes me away from the laundry.

And it won't be dry any time soon.... fiddle fiddle fiddle tweak.

the first one IS crap, but as it was my first ever oil painting, I'm forgiving myself, and that will be a bottom in the middle one.