Lonely Palm

I had so much fun painting this one.  I used black gesso on the canvas before I started painting.  I love the matte finish of the black gesso and hope that when the oil paints dry on this one, the black bits peeking through will be a contrast with the shiny oils.  Of course, some oils dry flat, not shiny so I'll have to wait and see.

This was painted entirely with a palette knife.  I don't know why I don't do more palette knife paintings.  They are so different in the finished look and the feeling while I'm painting.

Along with leaving bits of black peeking through the paint throughout the painting, I left a black line between all of the major elements.  With my background making stained glass windows for so many years, I am still attracted to this look.

Lonely Palm
Image size 12" x 12"
Oil

Category › Hiesler park , nancy goldman , paintings of Laguna Beach , palette knife paintings , palm trees

Laguna - Poured Painting

I haven't done a poured watercolor painting for a long time so I decided to do one this week.  Poured paintings have a very graphic quality, which I really like.  Each time a layer of paint is poured and dries, another layer of resist is added to areas that don't need to be any darker to save those values from future pours.

This is a large painting, 22" x 30", and doing each pour was a bit messy.  I ended up with a lot of the paint on my shoes.  I haven't quite learned how to keep the paint on the paper while I'm blending the colors together.  I think I might be using too much paint.

I didn't stretch the paper because I have been told that the paper can be manipulated better if it's not stretched and can be bent to make the paint go where you want.  This paper, Arches #150, dried with big vertical ripples in it which made subsequent pours very difficult.  I think I'll try the next poured painting on stretched paper and see how that works or maybe I'll use a thicker paper.

By the time a poured painting is done, it is almost completely covered with resist so it's hard to know what it is going to look like when the resist is removed.  Taking the resist off is like opening a package.  You don't know what you're going to find.  It's really fun!

Laguna
Image size 22" x 30"
Watercolor

Category › Heisler Park , Laguna Beach , Laguna Beach paintings , nancy goldman , palm trees , poured watercolors

Costa Brava Palms

This is a wall mural that I did in acrylic. I started working on it back in November and I'm calling it finished but it's probably not. Originally I had drawn in a hammock between the palm trees but ended up leaving it out. That decision was made more because I was tired of working on it than because I thought it looked better without it.

The only other mural I have done was on the side of our house in an enclosed patio area. The total area was about 3' tall by about 60'. The walls were stucco and I used house paint. That really used a lot because the texture of the stucco used up so much paint. I painted the patio mural about 3 years ago and it looks exactly the same as it did then and doesn't look like it has faded at all. One wall gets sun all day and it looks no different than the walls in the shade. Since that was painted, I've been told that artist acrylics are very different than acrylic house paint because there is much more pigment and acrylic binder in the artist acrylics which should make them a better quality paint.

I bought some cheap acrylics (artist acrylic) to use on this mural because I thought I was going to use a lot of paint like I did in my first mural and I didn't want to waste my Golden acrylics. I figured even cheap artist acrylic would be better than using house paint. That old adage "you get what you pay for" was really true in this case. The new acrylics had the same pasty texture as my 20 year old acrylics had. I threw those old ones away and the same will probably happen with the new ones. There was so much drag, even when I was using matte medium to thin them, and that was making me curse. If you are thinking of buying acrylics and want to know what NOT to buy, send me an e-mail and I will tell you the brand name.

I've posted the work in progress photos below. You can probably see the hammock drawn in the first and second photos. Let me know if you think I should add it or not. Also, I had originally intended to have bougainvillea in the foreground. What do you think?

Costa Brava Palms

Image size 44" x 57"

Acrylic

Category › beach scenes , Mexico , nancy goldman , palm trees

Tropical Silk - Silk Paintings

Another silk painting for this week. I have always liked tropical art and I've been digging out my photos of tropical subjects because I'm in the mood to paint some now. I may try palm trees in some other mediums. I may do this design again in silk with brighter colors. I may do so many tropical paintings that you get tired of seeing them. I hope not because I really enjoy having you all visit my blog. : )

Tropical Silk

Image Size 16" x 20"

Silk dyes on silk

Framed
$400.00

Category › hand painted silk scarves , nancy goldman , Ocean , paintings on silk , palm trees , tropical paintings