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!

  

How Do You Fix a Sandwich?

RobotGirl is out of her element in the kitchen! 

Took me a while but I finally finished painting my Robot Girl in Illustrator and Photoshop! It was hard, but I learned a lot. Once I was done, I couldn't believe my eyeballs. Huh, the things you can do with a computer. I guess I better stop fartin' around now, though. I'm supposed to be doing my homework. I'm taking a course called The Sellable Sketch by Michelle Fifis. She's awesome. 

Bye for now.

Going A Little Stripey

I was playing around with stripes and came up with this design that I really liked. Except the colours didn't go with my original design but I really liked them. So I thought I'd try and lighten the motif. Love that aqua! When I was little, my mum bought me a Rocky and Bullwinkle colouring book along with a giant pack of crayons. I coloured every single picture a beautiful shade of aqua. 

This is definitely not the finished arrangement. I was just trying to put something together fast to check the colours out. With a little more fiddling it could work for a baby print. Summer hat, little dress. T-shirt onsie.

And here's a stripe with stronger colours. I think this would be cute as a reversible beach bag with a white, cotton rope cord woven through large silver grommets. Could maybe lose some of the red. It's been really fun experimenting and learning how to use my Adobe Illustrator program although designing is much harder than I thought it was going to be. 

Summer Fun!

I'm taking The Ultimate Guide to Repeats Workshop, taught by Michelle Fifis of Pattern Observer.  She's a marvelous instructor and I love the class! Anyway, here's what I've learned. This type of pattern is called a tossed layout. It's supposed to look random but it was hard, hard, hard, because my little inflatable seahorse was... I'll say randomly challenged. But if you know me you'll know that's not what I said. It began with four days all to myself. The first day I worked for 16 hours. Pah! Then had to start all over again the next day and the next day after that. So glad my family wasn't here to witness this. I would have never heard the end of it. OCD comes to mind. The finished repeat is 11 x 11 inches square and here it is in four colour ways. I'll be spending the next week working on some coordinating fabrics to go with it. I think I got this.  

See you soon!

A Big Splash of Colour!