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.

Week 8 - Paint With One Colour

This week the challenge was to paint with one colour using different shades by only adding white or black. I decided to try watercolour on watercolour paper. The first colour I experimented with was ultramarine blue - added a lot of white and did a wash of this pale colour first leaving a lot of white areas, then straight colour, then added some darker shades - waited till it dried and added a bit more straight colour to add some depth. Got carried away with the wavy black lines.

I enjoyed doing this, so did a second one with cerulean blue in the same way. This time while painting the pale wash I thought it should look like a sky scene. Very happy with the softness of this painting and quite happy of what I achieved using only the one colour.

I loved the challenge of using the one colour and painted a third piece using sap green. Again added a lot of white did a wash, floated in some straight sap green - added black and fl0ated in some shadows. This one felt like a pond so that is what I tried to create with the different shades. Once dried painted in some reeds and branches using just the white and black. This is my favourite painting and I can see it expanded out into a larger piece, adding a few more colours and maybe a water bird of some sort.

I thoroughly enjoyed playing around with the washy effect of the watercolours all running together and quite amazed of what I created with a limited colour. I like the fact with watercolour you can lift the colour out and create white areas.

Week 7 - Painting to the Music

As Li-Sa and I both enjoyed this emotion music challenge, we decided to repeat it this month but this time using a different medium and different music. I have been a bit slack due to having a overseas visitor but did finish just a little bit later than normal. I decided to use water colours and listen to mediation music by Sacred Earth - Pamanyungun. I was going to use blue/green colours but once I started putting washes of colour on felt like I had to use more earth colours of brown and green, then the red happened and a tree with blue leaves appeared! Maybe it was the name of the group Sacred Earth that made me think of these colours. I only used cartridge paper - much prefer to use watercolour paper and will try and get some larger sheets for next time I want to use the washy effect of watercolours. I do enjoy using the watercolours as I love the flow of colours into each other.

Mountainscape From Week 2 - Finish

This is my second painting from Week 2 challenge - creating a mountainscape using tissue paper. I put it up on a wall and after looking at it a bit decided to make the raised tissue folds stand out more using hard pastel crayons. I also lighten and darked areas with my pastels and decided I quite liked this painting and the technique of using tissue paper. Will try and experiment with on a different piece later on.

Week 6 - Use Aluminum Foil in a Painting

This technique calls for aluminum foil to be glued to your paper with gel medium and salt to be sprinkled on while the gel was still wet. I started with three triangles - different sizes going up the page and put a wash of blue and red acrylic paint to create different shades, then added a mix of yellow/orange/burnt sienna to create some rust and dark tones. The photo doesn't really show any of the foil still coming through - in reality you can still see glints of the foil. Not totally happy with this piece as I don't feel like it looks "rusty" enough - would like to play around this this technique a bit more and try and rough up the foil a bit.

Week 5 - Paint What You Hear

This week was an emotion painting. We had to close our eyes and listen to the noises around us and paint what we could hear. I did this on a cold wet day sitting outside with all my painting equipment around me. I didn't really like doing this painting - couldn't really get into it. All I could hear were cars, lots of car noises - fast, slow, loud and lots of different birds, flying past, chirping, fighting on the roof! With my eyes shut I noticed it was a light black with speckles infront of my eyes and if I squeezed my eyes very tightly the speckles became green/yellow blobs. So..... this is what I painted - a black background with speckles, with lines of car noises - all different sounds in the distance and ever now and then a car close by in a different direction. The bird sounds became arrows, my dogs claws on the concrete sounded like yellow dashes and the rain on the roof white dashes/dots/lines. As I said before - couldn't get into this piece and didn't enjoy painting it and don't like it at all!