Simple Paintings 9 & 10

Tags

acrylic paintings, dictionary page art, painted dictionary page, paintings, shadows, Simple Paintings, trees

This lesson is called “Light, shadow, and value outdoors” and I quite enjoyed it. The road turned out to be a weird band-aid color, but I enjoyed the shadow colors and how to blend them. It was interesting to me that they were not made from adding black to the previous color (which is how I would have done it) but rather mixing a darker version of the color using black and a base color. For the road shadows the author recommends adding burnt sienna.

This exercise was about layering over and underpainting and can I say that I’m really loving working with glazes! I’m not a fan of his tree silhouettes, but I may redo this one and the previous tree using reference photos for the tree shapes.

I hope you have a beautiful day!

Simple Paintings 8 & 9

Tags

abstract, acrylic paint, acrylic paintings, art, dictionary page, dictionary page art, painted dictionary page, Simple Paintings, trees

This painting was to work with increasingly opaque layers of paint. I struggled with it and am not thrilled with how it turned out. Maybe a mandala on top will help. In any case I will use it for mandala experimentation.

This painting uses more or less the reverse color order of my first abstract and I used modeling paste through a mandala stencil. It was a good learning experience. Again, I may use it for experimenting with layering a mandala on top.

It is seriously snowing here! I hope you have a safe and beautiful day.

Lenten Offering: Simple Paintings

Tags

acrylic paint, acrylic paints, dictionary page, dictionary page art, Etsy, learning to paint, mandalas, painting

Yesterday in church our pastor was talking about the practice of giving up something for lent. She also talked about increasing an activity or behavior instead. I’m going to focus on using what I already have for art supplies and really focusing on painting. Well, I have been playing around with this book about learning how to paint with acrylics through the creation of 50 small paintings. I have done one and they make lovely backgrounds for mandalas.

So my plan is to make a painting a day as much as possible and work on the mandalas on the days I can’t paint. We are going to be heading back to WI in a few weeks and I wanted something more portable for while we are traveling.

Here is the book and the 2 paintings I did yesterday.

As you can see I learned that using masking tape on the dictionary pages doesn’t work very well so I’m just trying to keep tidy edges. One thing that is interesting about the picture of fields and trees is that the darker field is on the word “field” on the dictionary page. That was totally coincidence, but once I noticed it I tried to keep that part translucent. Something I learned in the making of the painting is that you can combine Mars Black with Cadmium Yellow Light to make the darkest green of the trees. The Moonlight Delight painting is for sale in my Etsy store. More paintings will be available by the end of Lent.

Gratitude Journal and Mandalas

Tags

100 Mandalas, art journal, Art Journal Every Day, dictionary page, dictionary page art, flowers, Gratitiude journal, gratitude, leaves, Mandala

Last week I didn’t make a gratitude journal post so this week you get 3 pages and some mandalas that I’m selling on Etsy! There is a lot of good in this scary world, even now.

I got some Caran d’Ache Neocolor II artist crayons and played with mixing them and adding water for these flowers on a black gesso background. I didn’t paint the flowers on the gesso, I left white flower shaped spaces on the page. Then I played with different white tools for drawing lines on the black. The little mandala/lotus flower was practice for a mandala that is now for sale on Etsy.

The torus mandala on the right hand page is a mock up for a community mandala I hope to do at my church. I’m really excited about it. The left hand page is an experiment that didn’t go very well. I’m still sorting through lots of boxes of stuff from the move and I came across a really old silk scarf and I thought it would be cool/interesting to put it in my art journal. It made it really difficult to write on the page and it disintegrated more when I put it on with acrylic matte medium. So I added some more acrylic paint and used paint to write on it – still a little messy. I have noticed that I’m using more black in my journal. I do like the contrast it provides, but it also reflects the darkness I’m feeling these days.

I posted this mandala on Etsy for $60.

I’m going to post this mandala on Esty for $20.