Week 10 - Printing With Plastic

This week we followed an exercise from my book Celebrate Your Creative Self by Mary Todd Beam - have found quite a lot of good exercises in this book to expand our knowledge by using different items, like the tissue paper and aluminum foil challenges.

The first layer is just a coat of dark blue mixed with black, then a very wet wash of white gesso - into this I laid some geometric shapes I cut out of a plastic painting drop sheet. After drying and removing the plastic the first picture is what I ended up with.

I wanted to try some new acrylic paints by Matisse - a transparent yellow oxide and transparent venetian red as well as quinacridone/nickel azzo gold by Golden. I loved the look of all these paints and went in with a few coats. I left a couple of areas and decided to paint these with ultramarine blue for contrast and didn't like it at all. I felt like all the attention was centered on the blue and not on the printed shapes. So I painted a white wash over the blue and covered it with more plastic to create some extra texture. While creating this whole painting I was looking at it horizontally and when I turned it vertical I saw two prehistoric creatures with eyes - just like you see on cave walls! So this is what my painting became. I put washes of the yellow and blue over the painted over blue areas - used my charcoal and smudged all the edges.

Overall I enjoyed doing this challenge and love the texture that printing with the plastic created. I especially love the fact I have ended up with something that looks like two prehistoric creatures.

Week 9 - Paint a Macro Organic Item

Li-Sa suggested we paint something organic but take a close up look at it like you do with macro on a camera and paint or draw what we see. So one afternoon I wandered around my yard and took a heap of photos of flowers and leaves up close. Decided on this one leaf as it had a lot of lovely veins through it with different shades of green.


Thought I would try my hard pastels for this one. Found it quite hard to get the right colours of the different greens - the vein down the middle is quite yellow with a lime green edge. The dark green markings on the leaf had touches of dark red and white blobs which you don't really notice at first when looking at the whole leaf - these colours only seem to appear when you take a "macro look" at it. I put a brown border around the leaf to finish it off.

Forgot how messy working with pastels was - used only cartridge paper and it didn't take as much colour as I would have liked. Didn't mind this exercise but not one of my favourites.