Chilli Painting

Li-Sa and I have not had any more recent challenges - so I have decided to try and finish one of my unfinished paintings that I started a while back. My chillies are from a painting lesson I did where you put together a series of pictures from magazines, move them around and create a new painting from it. I loved these chillies against the blue door. I keep fiddling around with it changing the leaves, etc - trying to decide if it needs more work - still not sure it it does.

Challenge 13 - Before Time

After playing around with building up a few different colours/layers to my abstract landscape this is what I have ended up with. I like the texture of the painting but not fussed on the scene. Have called it "Before Time" as it looks like a time when earth began with weird trees and big birds - didn't end up with my cavemen anywhere. Will put it up and look at it for a while and see what I can change to improve it or maybe just paint over!

Thought I should start and add some paint to my scene, whatever it will be, and see where it leads me. Definitely had birds in a sky, so I painted that. Then I picked out a few images that looked like trees and painted those. The rest of it was going to the ground/scenery - so I painted it green. I am hoping the texture from the plastic printing will create some interest once I add some more layers of paint. Not sure about it yet??

Challenge 13 - An Actual Painting

Have decided to change my headings to which challenge number we are up to. Li-Sa and I thought we should take one or more of the art challenges we have already done and create an actual painting - take a month to work on it. Without any idea I stared at a blank canvas for ages not wanting to create a failure or mess - afraid to start. Decided I liked the white gesso over black with the plastic printed into the gesso to create some texture. Thought I will do plastic men/bird figures and create a scene with cave men and big birds in the sky!! Totally lost my cave men as I got carried away with the plastic creating texture. The brown on my white gesso is from some old plastic I used previously. So now I am staring at a black/white painting wondering what it will become. Maybe a abstract scene with big birds in the sky, trees coming out of the ground???

Week 11 & 12 - Painting A Forest Floor

This is another exercise from the book by Mary Todd Beam. We did this one over a two week period as it had a few steps. I used watercolour paper, watercolours and some acrylic paint. Some leaves were added first using adhesive shelf liner, then washes of watercolour paint to build up the layers of leaves, lifting off techniques to create sticks, laying down of plastic over the wet paint to create more leaves in the layers. After everything dried I pulled off the adhesive shelf liner leaves - unlike Li-Sa I had trouble making my leaves stick where Li-Sa's stuck too well. These leaves are suppose to be the top layer of the forest floor and have more detail in them although it doesn't show too well in the photo. I liked using the shelf liner to create the white which can be painted in after and can see myself exploring this technique further in other paintings.

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.