30 Days Hath September

30 Days Hath September
Collage of 30 paintings completed  by Pat Fiorello
during 30 in 30 challenge

Well I'm relieved that September is over. I took on the 30 in 30 challenge to complete 30 paintings during the month along with over 400 other artists all participating on-line and sharing  daily via their blogs. Thanks to Leslie Saeta, the sponsor of the challenge and PicMonkey.com, I figured out how to make a collage which includes excerpts from each of the 30 paintings.

 The challenge pushed me to do more painting, especially since I was traveling for half of the month and had to "double up" on some other days. So I had to get up earlier, work in the evenings when I might normally not have, say no to other things, work on smaller size canvases,  figure out how to post from Italy etc...but I saw that it was do-able if I was committed.   Since I'd been traveling and dealing with some family issues over the summer I hadn't had as much time to get in the studio as I usually do, so it was a good way to get re-immersed. Also I hadn't been home long enough to go thru my photo's from the France and California trips earlier this spring, so I was able to at least tap into some of those photo's for inspiration and plan to spend some time this weekend going thru them all to see what else I'd like to paint based on those images.

After the challenge ended I took a couple of days off from painting, but yesterday got back in the studio seeing how I might translate one of the small 8 x 8 studies into a 20 x 20 canvas. Will keep you posted and share when it's done. Thanks for following along and cheering me on during the challenge. And thanks to all the other artists who stretched beyond their comfort zones to take this on. Hope you learned lots!