Painting On Tissue Paper

I had what I call a spirit painting on a piece of watercolor paper with a variety of pastels that seemed a bit too bright for a background. To get a good background this way, wet the watercolor paper thoroughly, let it reach the "sheen" stage, and then drop in the watercolor colors you want. This technique works well to start a modern type of floral where you aren't painting from reality, but you can tell it looks like what it is supposed to be. It's a good start from which to begin painting negatively.

So anyway this particular background was too intense, so I got the idea to cover it with tissue paper which muted the colors considerably. I just applied pieces of tissue paper to the watercolor paper using acrylic gel medium. I liked the result and ended up making two paintings out of it. One of them is a cute little clothesline painting using the scenes I remembered from our Italian trip.

It makes a nice little piece of whimsey! It's painted in acrylics with black marker and a white gel pen to finish up.

For more information, click here.

(This painting sold in February.)

Back To Painting Again - Creative Process

Hello! After two weeks of travel, we have reached Colorado where we will be for the next couple of months. It's familiar territory for me, since it was home for many years. I feel so blessed to get to spend time in two places that have such natural beauty and yet are so different from one another.

When we reached Denver, that city was almost at the end of a 25-day streak of 90 degree days, and incredibly they have only had a bit over three inches of rain this whole year. The afternoon before we left there was a big fire in the grassland of Green Mountain which came so very, very close to a neighborhood of expensive homes. As we drove up in the hills we could see the charred remains of the fire which covered somewhere around 900 acres on the east side of the mountain.

Today I got to paint with my friends in the Glenwood Springs Art Guild and enjoyed chatting with them and catching up on what had happened since I last saw them. I did make some progress on the Italian wash job painting that I previously shared on the blog. This is the painting I had started before we left on our trip. The first few steps in creating this painting can be found on the blog dated July 12th entitled Creative Process. (Click to refresh your memory).

Today I started adding watercolor to the inside squares (the background is all acrylic). I could hear Pink Floyd singing Just Another Brick In The Wall
as I painted the stones using many different colors, mixing bits of cobalt blue, burnt sienna, quinacridone gold, Winsor purple, brilliant orange and a little caput mortem from time to time. But first I painted the sky in the left panel and all of the windows.

Of course, after I stepped back from the painting I could see some issues I will have to keep in mind in the next painting session, the most bothersome to me is the almost "kiss" at the left bottom edge of the roof. I am also going to have to be very cognizant of the colors of the stone and not let everything blend together into the background. I am now thinking about making the right square more blurred so that the effect would be like a camera tightly focusing on the left square. Also, I'm not finished outlining the squares and creating the shadow effect I want.

Taking a photo of your paintings when they are still unfinished and looking at them on a computer screen helps also to point out any color issues. I found that the window reflections are not reflecting the sky color, and I will need to address this also.

So, that's where I am after this painting session. There will be more to come. Stay tuned.

Creative Process

Today I am going to give a little bit of insight into my thought process as I begin a new painting. It is going to be a fairly large painting, and it will take a little more time to complete than some of my painting-a-day smaller ones.

First the idea came into my mind that I would like to do a painting about clotheslines and clothes hanging on a clothesline. So I got out my photos of Italy taken in 2004 and found this one (shown top left). We saw laundry hung out to dry throughout Italy, and I thought it leant a lot of charm to the towns and cities. I took quite a few pictures of laundry, but unfortunately most were side shots that didn't turn out well, so this front shot is the one I came back to. Next I went to find a photo of the painting (Hung Out To Dry) that I had done before, using this photo as inspiration (shown top right). This painting had sold right away, and I remembered liking it and thinking I wouldn't mind keeping it around to have for myself.

Then I did some sketches of building and laundry, and more buildings with laundry, and came up with this one. I liked the idea of it being more than just a picture of that subject and having the space broken up with shapes within shapes.


I started out thinking my focal point would be on the bottom left where the dark dress hangs, but by the time I had finished this sketch, I had decided to make the focal point in the right square. The idea of a blue background was my initial concept, but the square on the left has blue sky at the top (similar to the first painting), and this bothered me. So when I painted the background I made it a darker value of textural simulated stone. I will paint the sky in the left square a nice blue, and in the right bottom windows I will show the blue again reflecting the sky. I will probably find blue somewhere else - maybe in some of the laundry.

Here is where I am right now with the painting which is on a half-sheet of watercolor paper. I have painted in acrylics. I have shaded the left sides
of the "squares" to make it look like papers laying on a surface. The "square" on the right will have shading on top of the middle square, so that there will be an illusion that it is on top of the rest of the "squares."

I am planning a sandstone kind of finish for the buildings and some nice colorful laundry blowing across the page.