A Gift for a Granddaughter

Jenny's Gift

Acrylic on Canvas 16 X 20

Our oldest grandchild, Jenny, just got married the end of October. She said she would like an abstract painting, something mostly blue 14 to 16 inches. After looking in some decorator magazines and remembering some paintings I saw in model homes the trend seems to be a soft blending of color. So I got out my acrylics and had fun blending paint on the canvas. I used cobalt and Pthalo blue with a lot of white, added a little bit of light green and metallic copper for the compliment. If you look closely you'll see that there are two areas of texture which is glass bead gel. I covered the whole thing with an iridescent medium to give it a lovely sheen. Unfortunately that does not show up on the picture. Hope she likes it!

A Little Whimsy

Puff

Watercolor 16 X 20

Sometimes I like to make textured backgrounds for  watercolor paintings. I  use different papers, gauze, mark makers, or whatever. Often I have something in mind, most of the time I'm just loosening up, playing with the paint and my "toys". As I looked at this, after it had dried, I liked it the way it was, the gauze had made a creature shape that looked like a dragon to me. So, I named it Puff. I'm enjoying him for now, maybe someday he'll be turned into something else. After all, he is magic!

Travel Time Art

Banana Blossom

Sketch book painting

I was able to do one painting while I was in Hawaii. We were with family for a wedding so there was lots of activity and very little time for getting out the watercolors or sketchbook. This was painted from a picture I took at the Garden of Eden on Maui. Bananas form from the top or stem of the blossom and continue as the stem grows. So this blossom will get smaller as more bananas form on the top. Really an unusual plant. After a stalk produces fruit it dies and new shoots come up from the base of the plant. Hawaii's climate seems to be perfect for bananas as well as pineapple and many other tropical fruits. There is a 6 hour time difference between Florida and Hawaii, I'm just getting adjusted after a week being back. It's good to be home! 

First Show of the Season

My Magnolia

Watercolor 15 X 15

October is the beginning of the art show season here. The first show at the art league was to be specific to our area of southwest Florida. I have a magnolia tree that blooms every spring and I love to take pictures of the flowers and paint them. This is one of the pictures that I entered into the show. It got many compliments but no mention by the judge. And that's they way it goes at art shows! There were many fine paintings entered, we are a group of very talented artists and the competition is steep but most of us are very supportive of one another. Artists make pretty good friends, I think. We have a nice opening reception with food and wine. It's good to be back in the swing of things.

What I Learned

Moonlight Serenade

Collage 10 X 10

I did another collage with my lady in the Klempt style dress. I must admit that while I have a general idea of what I will put together with the colors and theme, after I get going it evolves into a life of it's own. I find I need something for this space, or I need to tone down that and add a little more of this. It is so unlike planning and painting a watercolor. 

My lady was an acrylic transfer and was rather ghost-like when it was applied. She disappeared into the dark background. So, I had to paint over most of her with acrylic so she could be seen. The take away from this was, acrylic transfers must be placed on a lighter background. My "aha moment". Some things are taught better by experience! 

Lesson #2

Tropical Fish with Coral

Watercolor

In my beginner art class we practiced sunset skies again. Into these skies I had them practice blowing tree branches with the straw method. Blowing reduces the fear factor of making it look perfect. This method was shown to me in workshop with Lian Quan Zhen a few years ago and we painted tropical fish with coral which will be  Lesson number 2. It looks complicated but the fish are drawn on and then masked off with masking fluid. When that is dry blobs of paint are blown into coral shapes with a straw. It's a fun way to put in an otherwise complicated background that can tend to get too picky. 
I'm teaching at a wonderful facility which is called Lifeline Family Center. It's a residence where young mothers get prenatal care, education, parenting classes, and counseling. In about two years they are ready to support themselves and their children. Some of them go on to higher education. Art is a way to have fun and enrich their lives. Two of my students have just had their babies and are on maternity leave from classes so they concentrate on caring for and bonding with their babies. As a result, I am down to one student for the time being. 

Watercolor Lessons

 Sunset Palm 2

Watercolor 9.5 X 7.75

Sunset Palm 1

Watercolor 9.5 X 7.35

I've been asked to teach an art class to some young women and it has been a struggle for me. I'm starting from scratch and the lessons have to be simple enough to accomplish in a 2 hour session. Thanks to a video by Jean Lursen, a fellow blogger, I have a simple sunset to try. The top one was done with Mission paints plus payne's gray for the dark area. The bottom one with quin. gold and orange. I'm going to go with the brighter colors for today's class.

I hope I have some student work to post in the future.

Bird In The Hand

Bird In The Hand 

Collage, 6 X 6

I left some of the strings from the string paper on the collage. When the collage is mounted on a panel they will add some interest to the piece. The string paper is made by layering string in between two pieces of tissue paper and then coating with diluted acrylic and gloss medium. 

Bird In The Hand

(detail)

Collage 6 X 6

This shows the collage a little larger for detail. It's made of a combination of hand made papers, magazine pages that have been altered and commercial papers. Everything has been coated with

acrylic gloss medium and heat fused to 140# paper. I plan to mount it on a wood panel but it could be matted and framed as well. I think I'm going to have some fun with this bored looking lady holding different objects,quite a few things come to mind. Do you have a suggestion? Make a comment below. Thanks for taking time to read my blog.

Afternoon Wine in the Garden

Watercolor, 8 X 8

I painted this from one of the many photos I took at Butchart Gardens when we visited a few years ago. It's another watercolor that I intend to mount on a gallery wrapped canvas and apply wax. I really like the looks of the presentation and I hope that buyers do too. The Primroses I posted a few weeks ago were also from that collection of pictures and have been waxed and look great. 

Bright Sunflower

Bright Sunflower

8 X 8 watercolor mounted on wood panel

This is one of three watercolors I have finished  and mounted so that they are ready to wax with Dorland's Wax Medium. This will protect them and give them a soft finish without the glare of glass in a frame. Because there is no costly framing, I can offer them for sale for less expense to me and to the buyer. They are not permitted in the bigger watercolor shows, though. Those still have to be shown under glass or acrylic. 

Small watercolor paintings

Primrose

Watercolor 6 X 6 

Mounted on wrapped canvas and waxed

I'm working on some small watercolors that I can mount on either wrapped canvas or wood panels and protect with archival wax instead of putting them under glass. It's the best of both worlds, watercolor art but displayed with no glass reflections to get in the way of enjoyment. I spay them with UV protective acrylic first and then coat them with several layers of Dorland's wax. I like the results very much and I hope customers do too. 

Painting and Posting

Koi Pond 

Acrylic on wrapped canvas 10 X 10

I've been painting quite a lot lately. I have 3 classes a week during the summer just to keep me busy. So busy that I haven't had time to post in my blog or to read the blogs of the artists I follow. 

This acrylic pour I posted before without the fish. I just thought it needed something more. I printed out some pictures that I took at a koi pond, cut out the fish and positioned them on the painting. When I found the right size and shape I just painted them in.  I like the result. 

Flamingo Collage

Flamingo 

Acrylic and Collage

I don't know how time can disappear like it does. I have a hard time keeping up with the blog these days. That said, on with the painting. This is a do-over. It was an all acrylic painting of a flamingo on a full sheet of watercolor paper. After languishing in a frame for more than a year I decided to take it out and collage on it. My inspiration is Elizabeth St Hilaire, who does this type of collage. I love her work! I decided to crop the Flamingo into a smaller format, picked out some papers that were mostly manufactured plus a couple of hand painted papers and cut and tore pieces to cover the whole bird. It was quite a challenge but fun. Everything is adhered with acrylic mat medium. I left the original background because I like how it was done in a loose, drippy, transparent manner.  

Blue Water

Acrylic 16 X 20

It started out as an abstract, it has quite a lot of collage in it and many layers of paint. Then the two little sailboats turned up so I let them stay. Maybe after awhile I'll paint them out. Right now I think I  will call it finished and start something else. 

Abstract Landscape

Abstract Landscape

12 X 18 Acrylic on paper

I'm still going to an abstract class on Saturday mornings. This is a work in progress, but it's in my attempt at something non-tropical, having a more southwestern feel. It looks quite pink in the picture, instead of the soft orange I was going for. Acrylic color mixing is so different from watercolor, it takes a lot of adjustment. It's quite the learning curve. 
I thought I'd post it anyway, before the day and then the week gets away from me. I miss that push of the 30 in 30, that really gets my juices flowing. 

White Flowers

Bush Roses

Watercolor 11 X 7.25

White flowers are always a fun challenge. You need to keep them white while still laying in interesting shadows. I loved this picture of the roses in the sunlight at Portland's Rose Garden. This painting has an abstract feeling to it with the roses floating cloud like in the picture, cropping it in a little would eliminate that some, but after doing some abstract work I kind of like that feeling. I did the painting by masking out the flowers and doing the dark background first. Personally, I think it's just as easy to paint the dark colors around the subject without using the mask and all the steps that takes. 

Fauvism

Yellow Road

Acrylic on paper 18 X 24

My Saturday Abstract class was on Fauvism. They were the artists who wanted to deviate from the norm of realistic renderings after photography became popular. People no longer needed an artist to do a portrait, they wanted a photographer. Instead of smooth strokes, they painted with short strokes of varying hues. This painting is my attempt at that style. Only the red roof is smooth for contrast.  I outlined my subjects with black at the end. We painted very quickly without over thinking it. It was harder than it looks! It sort of reminds me of Van Gough, at least that's what my husband remarked. It was fun getting out of the usual way of doing things.

The Collage

Well, I fooled around with PicMonkey for about an hour yesterday and gave up. I could not find the way to make my own grid. Whenever I hit the "make your own" button it came up with one big square, when I tried to add another picture it went underneath the first one. No way was I getting a grid! I may look in another program for the collage feature but right now the frustration level has me feeling quite negative. 

One the other hand, my abstract class this morning was fun. We worked on Fauve-ism. Everyone in the class came up with wonderful pictures, I will post mine when it is ready. 

February 30 in 30 Days- Day 30

Sail at Dawn

Watercolor 15 X 15

30 days completed! Hooray! I'm very happy that I did this, it's a good kind of discipline. Sometimes I haven't been giving myself "permission" to paint because of other things I think I ought to be doing. I could now set that aside, I had a deadline to keep. 

This painting was started as a wash a long time ago, I don't remember what I had in mind when I did it, but I had an iridescent coating over the whole thing. I decided to put sailboats in it and define the horizon line and clouds a little more. Maybe I'll put in some seagulls as well. It was a fun find to work on. It was difficult to photograph well, maybe the iridescence interfered. 

February 30 in 30 Days- Day 29

Speckled Rooster

Watercolor 5.5 X 7.5

I took a picture of this rooster at a friend's house. She lives in a rural area on a few acres and has a few chickens. It's a hassle to keep them safe from the coyotes and other wildlife but the reward is wonderful, fresh eggs. 

It's the second to last day of the 30 in 30, it's been quite a challenge. I think tomorrow will be a collage of all my paintings if I can figure out how to do it. I remember getting very frustrated with the process in the past, I hope it will be easier for me this time.