Yellow & Blue

I'm pretty happy with this painting. It's a 15x19 inch watercolor on 140 lb Strathmore cold pressed paper. It's mostly a happy accident because the process was not exactly as planned.

The paint mixing chart from the January 2nd blog entry was used as a reference to pick Cotman's lemon yellow and intense blue. I used a dab of Cotman's cobalt blue here and there as well for variety. I'm very satisfied with the color of the painting so having the yellow and blue mixing chart was very useful. I should keep making these kind of charts for other combinations that may be used down the road.

My intention was to put down a big yellow area and then cover part of that area with wet blue and then lift vertical lines of that blue with a dry brush. The paint wasn't lifting very well. Maybe because the 140 lb Strathmore cold pressed paper has more texture and tooth than the smooth 5x7 inch sketch pad paper where i've tried with better success the lifting technique? More water was applied to try and unlock the stain in vertical lines, but this merely softened the line between where paint was and where it wasn't supposed to be. I wanted a more distinct border. So the whole painting was looking quite "soft" and i was disappointed. Then the "old crutch" cellophane wrap was laid on top of the wet mixture and wrinkles were purposefully made vertical. When that was dry, the painting was complete as it is now.

There was a bit of buckling in the paper and the paint pooled at the bottom of these waves. The wrap didn't touch the whole length of the paper because of the buckling. So if i try this one again, i'll make sure to stretch the paper using meat cutting tape to avoid the buckling. I may also try it again using hot pressed or smooth paper to see if the wet paint lifts more readily with a dry brush.

Mixed up Slazenger

I made this painting in response to a call for submissions by the Alberta Sports Council. It's a tennis player, but that's not obvious to everyone, so i hope they will like it and see it's relavent.

To make this one, i firstly used green painters tape to block out the area that would be the ball. Then i painted the racket area around it. The person was blocked-in with pale cadmium red. Then the round and box shapes were roughed-in in blue. I wanted them to lead the eye back to the racket and ball and create a repetitive rhythm of the ball. Even though extra layers of all the shapes were made after the first layer was dry, it still didn't pop and looked flat. So finally i wetted the whole paper and used a black Derwent coloured pencil to outline the shapes. I finally removed the green painters tape and splashed in the yellow. Plastic food wrap was lay on top the yellow ball shape as it dried. When it was dry the wrap was removed and I filled-in the wrap resulting pale areas with a cadmium yellow. After that was dry, the ball area was wetted again and the black Derwent pencil outlined the shape.

Great Day

I'm having a great day! It suddenly dawned on me how to make this blog more successful. It's a pretty simple idea, but just a different frame of mind than i had before. If i want this to be a medium for communicating with fellow artists, i have to develop those relationships and then maybe they'll visit here. Before i was just hoping they'd discover this blog. So i'll work on growing relationships.

I also got a couple more calls to show the house that will be vacant in May. Di and i were considering lowering the price because we haven't had any interested renters inquiring over the last couple days. But that slowness was probably on account of the Easter holiday. I'm still confident we can get that place rented on time.

I'm experimenting on the backside of a "unsuccessful" painting. I put vertical green painters tape strips down to keep part of the paper white, and then put wet indian red and burnt umber paint on wet paper in between the stripes. After that dried, i put ivory black and intense blue where the green tape had been.

The whole thing still had a pretty flat tonal range, so ivory black was put over parts of the indian red and burnt umber strips too. I thought it was still lacking something, maybe texture? So i taped plastic food wrap over the paper and tried to drip ivory black paint down the backside of the film wrap between the film and the paper. This added texture on the areas where the paper had buckled from being wet and not being stretched and it touched the film. This created texture horizontally because the paper had buckled horizontally. I also ran my finger nail down the length film over some of the strips and that created even more markings on the paper.

First Day

Today is the first day of the rest of my life. Haha, that is pretty cliche sounding, but so true. Too bad words of wisdom are so familiar they don't seem very insightful. Like the main point of every book on becoming wealthy is save 10% of your salary. Whenever i hear it, i'm like yeah, yeah what else do have to say? Maybe if i would just do that and stop looking for something easier or maybe more secretive, or i don't know why everyone just doesn't do it? Requires discipline i guess? Anyway getting back to the point is that today i'm a painter.

I've been painting the last couple evenings, and had a couple pretty successful paintings come from it. I'd like to keep it up. It seems purposeful. That i'm just not wasting days, nights, weeks waiting for my next vacation. That sounds pretty bad reading it back. Like i don't have a good relationship with my partner. Well i'm probably guilty of not trying hard enough sometimes and that's why it sounds so bad. But everyone needs alone time and it would be good if it doesn't feel wasted.

So doing these last couple paintings makes me want to continue on a regular basis. I don't know how acclaimed this work will be, but if i put in my previously mentioned 10,000 hours, i should become somewhat proficient, at least to myself. I am a painter.

Off again on a tangent, which i feel at ease doing because my audience here is so easy going, I wonder when people say "just be yourself" when performing, or producing some sort of art, that if some people are more commercially viable being themselves than others. I mean obviously the king of pop appeals to more people than the guy in the park spinning around in circles and howling at the tree tops, but is Oprah being herself when she does her favourite things show or book club selections, which produce obvious kickback opportunities. I've heard if you're not yourself, people will know you're ingenuine, if not consciously then intuitively just not like you.

Can i name drop paper or paint brands in my painting blog and still be myself and potentially get some kick backs like Oprah, or is that kind of thing ingenuine? Maybe it depends on how much i really love a paint brand. And also if my audience likes my work, and would like to know how i did it? But is that being me, or is it ingenuine? Maybe people like Oprah or Rachel Ray are great successes because they are genuine and genuinely a commercial success, but perhaps other folks who are being themselves just aren't succeeding because there is no commercial component to their self. What if someone is great and people love that genuine person, but they started plugging something? Would that make them ingenuine and turn those who previously loved them off?