Rorschach Card

I like this one. It's interesting. But I have no idea what it is? A Rorschack question I suppose.

Mountain Lake Abstract

I started this painting trying to stencil some curved marks onto the paper. They looked okay but i wasn't sure how i'd make a whole painting from this technique. So i quickly started using the brush full on.

I was probably using too watery a mixture because the painting was starting to look too greyish without any depth. I wanted some hard lines and texture so i put on the plastic wrap again.

I like how the black trickled down the wet wrap, so i covered the whole painting using this technique. Then the board was flipped over and red was applied in the same manner.

After drying it and flipping around to see which way it looks best, i settled on the vertical aspect. It looks a little like a mountain scene with a lake and red sunset reflections in the foreground.

I'm sorry the video has poor lighting. I started it in the late afternoon and most of the light was coming in the window. But by the time it was finished the lighting was tungsten so the white balance is wrong.

Two Minute Watercolors

Today i worked on two minute watercolor sketches. I was hoping for happy accidents, but am pretty unsatisfied. Maybe I was being too controlling? Maybe i'm expecting too much? I was trying to accomplish some dry horizon lines in the foreground to help suggest which hills are closer and give the painting depth.

I might have to revisit the David Dunlop video to be inspired again. But i'm also tired of painting my Moab photo. Going to look for another photo before continuing with 2 minute watercolours.

I made little time lapse movies of my paintings. I think they all went over the 2 minute mark because I wasn't happy with the result. Going against conventional wisdom i'm sharing these crappy paintings with the world. On the upside, i liked the scraping effect created with the end of a metal ruler.

Fire Abstract

I'm REALLY happy with the way this one turned out. I used a combination of paint and colored chalk. I smeared the chalk on while the paper was still wet, and then brushed that into the painting again. Then i laid clear film on the lower half of the painting for texture. If i could duplicate these results i'd make 100 more paintings like this.

Actually I've been working on a different technique today. Results were not expected but I'll save that for when I post that work.

It's been a good day overall. I've kept the tv off even though i don't watch it closely when it's on. Today seems more productive than usual. I'm thinking tv is more of a distraction than i've admitted. I've even worked out somewhat intensely, which is a huge turn around to the trend.

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.