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Friday, March 19, 2010
If you've been to my blog before, you are probably checking to see if you are in the right place. Yes, this is very different from my usual style. This was a really fun exercise. I was at the Tustin Art League's monthly meeting and they had watercolor artist Victoria Templeton leading a quick workshop for us. I was apprehensive about participating because I usually over-think everything and spontaneous isn't a word people usually use to describe me. By looking at it as an exercise where I would create a mess and then throw it away, I was able to loosen up a bit. I don't know why I have such a hard time throwing anything away. I keep telling myself "It's only paper" but it doesn't seem to help. There were 2 still life set ups. For the first painting, we wet the paper, drew the composition with charcoal and then added color. I was having a lot of fun with it and thought it was coming out okay but after it dried, it looked very muddy to me. My friend Beverly, who is an encaustic artist, took it to use as a jumping off point for an encaustic painting. I'm sure she will make it into something incredible.
The one pictured above is the second painting. I liked this set-up better. The first still life had some flowers in it that weren't particularly inspiring and I made them look even worse! For this exercise, we wet the paper (this one was Fabriano), dropped in color where we thought it should be and then, while the paper was still wet, we drew our composition in charcoal. Wow, this took me WAY outside of my comfort level. I had ONE try to get it drawn right because there's no way you can erase charcoal from wet paper without getting a muddy mess. That is why this is titled 'Abstract Still Life' so people will think I planned to draw it so wacky! Anyway, I am pretty happy with it even though the drawing is really out of perspective. I thought about adding more paint and noodling it to death once it had dried but decided that I liked its simplistic look. Oh, by the way, the reason my greens look so dead is because I was using a limited palette for this. Only three primary colors and I obviously didn't have the right blue (or maybe it was my yellow) to make a clear green. I will definitely try this technique again. I think it would be a great warm up exercise for every painting.
Abstract Still Life
Image Size 14" x 21"
Mixed Media
Unframed
$275.00
Unframed
$275.00
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