Muscia & Kong Fu

Loved the latest movie, the great visuals, the connection to the animes, the additional story fluff and the music just kicks butt! Makes me want to smash color somewhere and I am pretty sure I will listen to this as soon as I paint miniatures again. Yes, I am not able to paint right now. Don't know why, but I want to know.

I call the stage I am in right now: 
Breathing, channelling inspiration, re-animate myself in sense of washing away many thoughts and habits that bind me to not feel happy. Interesting.

Speaking about painting miniatures and 2016:
Looking back on the figure projects I have painted in 2016 I can clearly see what I enjoyed there the most: A steep learning curve. I was so inspired of what I thaught myself about painting atmosphere and threw that all over my projects like a crazy gorilla with six arms. I really enjoyed that and painted plenty of projects that I did choose myself. A miniature or a bust was calling me, I quickly found my visions for the project and was able to apply them in a wonderful way of free happy painting. 2016 you have been amazing to me when it comes to painting. I burned my painting energies with focusing on learning more and more about strong visuals of atmosphere in my paintwork. Explaining stories with the choice of color and my brushstrokes. Powerful.

I was able to transport this into the early months of the new year and had some pretty much painting fun with some projects in  2017. I really had a great flow through my ideas, visions and projects. I really appreciate all the support from friends, collectors and other miniature painters. Everything worked well, I was truely focused. Then I finished a really big project that was very important to myself: Conan, by Black Sun Miniatures.

Conan on Putty&Paint

This project meant a lot to me. 
I was fascinated by the work of Frank Frazetta
ever since and 2016 was also a year where his work accompanied my thinking and color studies a lot. This project is a personal homage to his work, mainly in terms of color and ambience choices and personal achievements, but I did understand not much on Frazetta's way of working, I realized.

When I finished this project I somehow lost the spark of painting joy or felt an extreme lack of energy. Not that I think I somehow did Frank Frazetta's color work justice in my studies, nor do I think I learned everything about painting now. It is completly the opposite of it. I see more and more how far the horizons of learning to paint stretch to a neverending ocean of wisdom. Endless. I just hit another personal milestone, but somehow the energies to push my learning curve more and more did suddenly quit. A normal thing after a very productive 2016. Very normal. I just needed time to understand what is actually happening with my painting spirits. This took me a little while. Now I decide to speak about it on the Massive Voodoo blog, so far the jungle always helped me through different stages of my full time job as a creative soul. Why not now? I want to know why I lack in painting motivation on a large scale. I want to find new goals in my way of painting. What is there to study next? Superclean blending, I could try, but I am sure this is not me. Who knows. You see this ain't an easy question for myself.

Right now
if I only think about touching brush and paint I do not know where to go. No colorful vision do drop in. I can follow techniques that is for sure and techniques lead to blendings, smooth and rough ones. I learned to appreciate both when I know where to use them. All I can tell is that this is absolutelyx weird. Even after my weeks of relaxing from work on "vacation" there is no spark lighting up. As I said earlier I am pretty much looking forward to teach my upcoming weekend seminar about "atmosphere" soon. I am looking forward to the teaching aspect with nice and wonderful people.

Still, I did not touch a brush so far, but I quit on thinking this is something bad.
Everything happens for a reason and one day I will see.

Roman