Blue Bunny Tea Cozy

Out of the six tea cozies I sold today, this little 2-cupper is my favourite. 

She's pretty cute and small as you can tell by the teacup and saucer beside her. 

My six-cup Sweetheart bunny cozy flew out of the store the minute they put her on a pot.

Better start knitting, the owner of the shop wants as many bunny cozies as I can make. 

Yay!

Birch Bench Part 2

Outlined drawing ready for paint.

Sky first. Easy enough, so far, so good.

Shadow mass. Too early to judge.
Already this is not going the way I'd planned. Oh well, keep trying. It's a learning experience.

Building up colour with a pallet knife.

So that was way harder than I thought, but I like the blobby paint effect. I need a smaller pallet knife and a lot more yellow, the colours are wrong. I also need to stop and think about this for a while, like over night. I'm sure once I'm warmed up it'll go better. Though I have a feeling I'll be back to obsessing over the details with a paint brush in no time.

Aarrrhg! Must stay loose!

I thought I was quitting for the day but as predicted I'm already obsessing so I stayed and painted the trees on the right with my pallet knife. I managed to capture a little bit more of what I wanted. And believe it or not I lightened the sky. Acrylic paints dry so much darker than what I expect. I think it could still be lighter. I'm going to have to get used to mixing in a very pastelly way.

So now I'm really quitting for the day. I'm tired, I'm hungry and my hands are dirty, but I'm pleased.

Birch Bench

Well, I'm calling this new painting Birch Bench. I thought I'd go for a little harder subject this time, more of a landscape. And I really wanted to experiment with a different style too, a freer, more abstract look. There's a fabulous artist I found recently named Maxim Grunin. If you want to see him paint, check this video out on YouTube. He works with a pallet knife and I'm dying to try it. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W9_9ds9oNM

Anyway, I thought these two photos taken in Ft. Langley would make a nice painting.The river was too washed to see it clearly out so I took another shot of just the river and joined the two. 

This is the actual view from the bench the old man is on.

Here's the composition combined into one reference photo. In my finished drawing I've left out the fences and poles.  

 There's something about the old man and his dog sitting alone amongst all the high contrast shadows that I really loved. 

My pallet is a plastic tray from the dollar store. Here's a trick I saw in a book that's really helpful. You fold paper towel lengthwise into thirds, wet it, then lay it out along the sides of your tray to  keep your acrylics wet. Though with my Titanium White I find it easier to use wax paper so I can remove it if I need to. At the end of my painting day I stack two wet sponges in the middle of my tray so they're higher than my paints, then cover the whole thing in saran wrap. Works great for keeping them wet overnight. 

My canvas with my transferred drawing all ready to be outlined. It will be interesting to see if I can stick to a pallet knife style and keep my vision loose. Will be a challenge I'm sure since I'm such a detail lover.  

Morning Fuchsia Part 4

So it's been awhile since I posted my painting and I think I'm almost finished. This first picture is from a week ago. It's been very difficult trying to understand this paint. To see my process you'll have to scroll waaay down to part 1 from weeks ago. 

Nothing turned out the way I expected. 

Though once I started adding colour I felt a little more comfortable. 

On this particular morning as I was getting up my nerve to paint I saw that  

 some of the leaves near the bottom of the branch were all screwy. Everything was going in the wrong direction. Oh no! Hey, wait a minute. This is my practice canvas, I'll paint them out in white. See what happens. A little scary but not too bad.  

Then I took my pencil drawing outside to my plant, drew some new leaves that I was

happy with and transferred them onto my canvas

And after a million layers of paint and glazes, I finally made some headway. Fortunately, I was able to spend a whole week and at least 8 hours a day by myself, painting, because my husband was away. I'm not quite finished yet, I still need to detail the edges of the leaves and fix the main flower. 

But overall I feel better about it, not overly confident, but better.  

Though now I'm kinda sick of Fuchsias and I still have the real painting to do, the brainstorm that started this whole thing. 

Morning Fuchsia Part 3

So, here's where I left off last night. And today I put in another 8 hours. I think I'm making progress. It's been really hard figuring out how to handle the paint. In the last couple of hours I finally started to get it. 

I couldn't figure out how to make the colours I wanted either. I always go too dark, plus the paint dries darker which really confused me. But once I got the colours right things really started falling into place. Even my paint brush behaved itself.

 I used the colour picker on my Mac to help me make the nice light colours I was after. It's in the Applications folder in Finder and then in the Utilities folder. 

I opened my photograph to my desktop, put the Digital Colour Meter on my dock and just picked the colours from the photo. Super easy! I was really surprised to see how far off I was. But it sure made me look at things differently.   

Morning Fuchsia Part 2

Ready to paint my outline of Fuchsias with sky and clouds.

I started off by doing an underpainting. Ew! Looks awful. 

Next I blocked in the sky. I like the skritchyness of it but it still looks awful. 

 I've added hightlights, thank goodness for my tonal map!  

Finally I put in some detail with cloud shapes, outlines and colour. I need a better brush. My clouds need work. 

Boy, all of a sudden 5 hours has gone by. I have to leave it for today. I'm getting tired and really confused about what to do next. I think I'm getting the hang of it but I still need time to let it sink in. I'm all wired. Tomorrow I'll have a better understanding. 

I have to say, I like the way it's going and the challenge of the fast drying paint. Doesn't let you fool around.   

Morning Fuchsias

I'm giving acrylic painting a try and here's the beginning of my first attempt. This drawing called, Morning Fuchsias came about because I wanted to do a small painting to get the feel of acrylic paints and working on canvas, neither of which I've ever used before. It's small, 14x11 compared with my initial drawing below which is 20x16 inches. I feel like the smaller drawing has more life to it and better composition, not that I know anything about composition. But it just feels better. It's funny cause I didn't care about the drawing when I was doing it, so I hardly took any time with it at all . I just wanted to get to the painting part. 

Here's the larger drawing I spent so much time trying to perfect. It feels really stiff to me. I'll paint it anyway just to see if I can paint, besides I've already transferred it to the larger canvas. 

I changed it a bit from my reference photo with some petal size adjustments and edited out a few things.  I'm also not sure about the colours. I really like the light green buds, I know I'll use those. I have two hanging fuchsias, a darker pink/purple combo and this pale one. 

In his book, Paint Red Hot Landscapes Mike Svob says to make a tonal map, which is what I did here. His work is very strong and full of energy.  http://www.mikesvob.com 

Then it was on to this colour map I did in pencil crayon. I chose rich colours after Gail Johnson's style. Love it!  http://www.gailjohnson.ca. Her work is so vibrant and beautiful. 

My canvas is ready to paint and I'm freakin' out. According to Michell Albala in his book, Landscape Painting, an underpainting of raw sienna with a touch of burnt umber is nice to put down first. Warms up the whole feel of the painting. His is an oil painting book but I'm hoping it's the same for acrylics. http://www.mitchalbala.com/

And finally, there's an acrylic artist I discovered that I'm madly in love with. Her name is Amanda Jones.  http://www.amandajones.ca. I went to see her work up close at the Birthplace of BC Art Gallery in Ft. Langley, B.C. and I think she puts a warm underlay down too. So that's what I'm going to do. She'll be painting in the garden there on the long weekend, August 4th. and 5th. and I'm going. I can hardly wait. The only trouble is I want to paint now and I don't know what to mix the paint with, a liquid acrylic retardant or just water. I saw on the Internet that too much water will make your paint crack after it dries. D'oh! This is really hard. Amanda Jones says, "Just do it." 

Okey- dokey, this afternoon I paint. Oy!