Pink Hydrangia

My latest acrylic painting. I liked the colors so much I'm using it in my header. These are my hydrangias this year...all pink and green. I did feed them once in the spring. If anyone has experience with turning them blue, I'd like to hear.

This was so much fun painting. It's kind of what I'm trying to gear towards...a more abstract approach to my paintings and ideas. One nice thing about acrylic is because it drys so fast, you can go over areas that aren't working. I started this painting with a pink to yellow underpainting and then painted the flowers around the colors.

I'm not sure if this painting's finished. I have to come back and look at it in a week. That's when everything finally jumps out at you.

Who Are You?

Here's another experiment in watercolor. For some reason, I need to follow a system or step-by-step process or I lose my way.



So here's what I did....the bird and swirl/leaf are taken from some fabrics samples that came from work. I just traced them. The round flower/snowflake shape is just a made up pattern. Then before I actually painted the background colors, I used colored paper to move around the color and come up with this pattern. Keeping the white behind the bird to draws your eye.

When it was almost done, I scanned it once and studied it on the computer. I realized that there needed to be a black line at the top also. So I added that (which should be darkened), and removed a leaf that was making the bottom right too busy. Sometimes seeing the painting on the computer screen really helps seeing it. I also added the series of dots to fill in the empty space.

I'm experimenting and trying to find my look...Do any of you know when you had a breakthrough that defined your style? I would love to hear from you.

Snow Flowers

My first attempt at acrylics. I tried to keep the colors simple so I could concentrate on technique. I love the fact that I can go over and over unlike watercolor. I made stencils like one of my favorite artist, Kate Birch. I also cut out oak leaves from wallpaper and glue/gesso it on. I had to go over the design with brown paint because they faded away too much.

I might hate it tomorrow...Tell me what you think?

Jingle Bell Tree II

Once again, I love playing around with the crop feature to see what better image I might get. This is still very rough, but I could see this as a card...

Jingle Bell Tree

It's not too early to be thinking about creating Christmas cards. This cute idea was an ad for the San Diego Zoo. I had fun trying out texture medium with this one. This is probably not the right image for that because it's hard to see on the tree. The background shows it better. I also learned to be sure you are totally finished before you write anything.

Unique Cropping

The start of this painting was rather nice and then, which happens more often then not, I rushed through it and lost my direction. I like it better cropped and flipped. Maybe I could start again using the cropped version as my guide. I also want the fan shell in front to lay down a little.

It seems like smaller and simplier seem to work out best.

Tucker

I caught Tucker listening to someone. My intent was to make some kind of Christmas card with this look ... maybe getting into mischief under a tree ...

I ended up just painting him as is. Sometimes you just have to paint for fun.