Meh

More experiments with knife and impasto. Pretty awful ones.  This is a little 3 x 3 (too small for the knife I'm working with), and while it's pretty terrible, based solely on texture I'm kinda digging it.  Doesn't it make you want to touch it?

I plan to work this one with some more. I think I need some different shaped knives and maybe some other random objects. I might try out my henna idea with it. Did I talk about that at all? Stay tuned. 

Testing, Testing, Check, Check

I know, I'm all over the place. I can't help but try a little of everything this month. So far oil (my "comfort zone" medium), watercolor, pastel/colored pencil, and today, painting with a palette knife. 

 

There's a side view so you can see the texture on this thing. Also the first time I've tried anything like still life.

As far as painting with a knife, it will definitely take some getting used to. I couldn't get my colors for the inside of the lamp the way I wanted them... I mixed and scrapped three colors that ended up looking muddy to me.  

 

How do you get brighter without paler? Is it even possible?  It feels like I should know this.  I'm such a noob.

Anyway, experiment #5 accomplished. I will definitely be playing with this some more, I think I like it... Probably some more organic subject next time. Lines are hard and in watching my knife idol Leonid Afremov at work, I think they're meant to be blurred anyway.

Maybe a bigger canvas, too... This felt pretty cramped. 

 

Going Big

The largest painting I have going (before today) was the Weimaraner painting, 9x12. I've been planning to do this flamenco dancer for my mom for ages now. I finally got her sketched and a rough background (ivory black with some crimson & violet mixed in, and some Payne's gray). I thought something with all that movement would be fun to try with the knife, so that's my plan. This is 18x24.

Snowbird

Messing around with pastel, charcoal and colored pencils. This is ACEO size.

The bits of snow I did at the end with oil paint. Might have been a bad idea... Should have used acrylic.

I need fixative spray.

Coalescence

Today's painting is about releasing attachment to the end result and allowing the process of painting to happen. And also, bringing forth something out of my own mind rather than reproducing something from a reference. It's about allowing and getting my left brain out of the way of creating. Letting go of fear of a "failed" painting. It doesn't need to BE anything. It just is.

I suspect that if I did more of this sort of thing as a warm-up before I paint, my painting would be a lot better. I am very right-brained right now. There's plenty of time this month to test this hypothesis, but not today.

Challenge! Day One

 

I finished the cherry blossoms. Yay! So this is my painting for the day, but because I did most of it last month it feels sorta like cheating... I really need to chill, I guess.  

 So, since the Sakura painting went very quickly I thought I'd play with some alla prima (wet into wet) painting, just to see how the paint behaves and how to get it on the canvas without muddying it.

This is the result. I pretty much hate it. But, I did learn from the experience, and that was the point. I want to let it dry and paint on it some more, but that kind of defeats the purpose of the exercise... I might do it anyway.

I painted in the background, then the tree, then used a dry brush to try to create the effect of wind in the branches, which succeeded for a while but then looked like I just smudged the paint (which... I guess is what I did). I'll come back and look at it tomorrow and decide what is to be done with it.

I made a page on my website for this month's Challenge paintings! 

Watercolor Experiments

I figured if I'm going to manage to do anything in watercolor this month, I could use a day to just mess around with the paint and see how it behaves. So first, a color chart like the one I did for oil.

Next, I experimented with random brush strokes and different degrees of wetness. 

Then, some washes. 

 

And finally, I wanted to see how it works if I start with a pencil sketch and actually tried to make watercolor do something recoginizable. So I painted this dragon's eye on ACEO watercolor paper. I plan to ink in some details later.

Brought to you by that oh-so-tantalizing glimpse of Smaug's eye at the end of The Hobbit movie. Waiting for the second movie is torture.

So there you have it, my no pressure experiments with watercolor, really the first time I've played with it at all. I plan to play with two books this month as far as my watercolor attempts... Stephanie Pui Mun Law's Dreamscapes: Creating Magical Angel, Faery & Mermaid Worlds With Watercolor (I have been a fan of Stephanie's work for over a decade), and Step By Step Guide To Painting Realistic Water Colors by Dawn McLeod Heim.

Let the challenge begin!