I've been painting :-)

I have started a series called "Trees of Life".  It was inspired by an online class that I took late last year - Diane Culhane's "For the Love of a Tree".

I posted a couple of paintings from this class on this blog post.

This first painting of the series is titled "A Perfect Day":

And in the landscape with beings theme, this is ready for its first isolation coat.  I've titled it "We Gather Together As Friends":

Reverse painted mixed media acrylic panel

Here's a second acrylic panel (mixed media assignment for Year of the Spark  - Collage and Reverse Oil Painting on Plexiglas® class by Lynn Whipple).

The panel features my boy Remy when he was about a year old - he's six now:

"DOGINT: Dog Intelligence"

This is the back (painted and collaged) side:

I used acrylic paint instead of oils.

I made this panel because I wanted to look up from my work and see my Golden looking back at me :-)
 
  

Collage and Paint on Plexi

Lynn Whipple ( Year of the Spark, Lesson 3 ) shared her experience of collage and reverse oil painting on Plexiglas®.

I used acrylic paint instead of oils mainly because acrylics dry quickly.  Painting on the reverse side is a slow process because there is a lot of turning back to front to check how the painting is progressing.

"1 2 3 Change" on non-glare acrylic panel

Having completed one of these acrylic panels I have to say that this technique is very messy - at least the way I do it - which gave me another reason to be happy that I chose acrylics.  Cleanup is much faster than with oils.

I like the technique a lot...messiness notwithstanding :-)

From Wolf to Woof!

The mixed media assignment I just completed (for  Carla Sonheim's 2014: Year of the Fairy Tale) has a wolf as one of the characters.  Well, I began with a wolf but as I created the illustrations using the techniques Carla demonstrated, my wolf morphed into another critter.  Let me show you.

First technique:

Pretty wolf-like, I think.

Next technique:

O, I see a change.

Final technique:

Um... a dog.

The first illustration is oil pastel on watercolor paper and the next two are acrylic and oil pastel also on watercolor paper.  I haven't used oil pastels much at all so this was an opportunity to haul them out of the cabinet and explore.

When I laid out all three pieces to assess the results my reaction was, "wow, these are really primitive" and then to my surprise, "there is something about them that appeals to me."

I am not putting away the oil pastels quite yet because I want to find out what the appeal is... :-)

Messy work

Getting messy with paint doesn't bother me which is a good thing as I become a mess and make a mess whenever I  work with paint. It's the clean up part that I don't like - I'm sure I'm not alone in this :-)

And creating monoprints is such an opportunity to get really messy. I've been working on the ones I pulled last week (Lesson One of Carla Sonheim's "Gelli Plate Plus" online class*).

So here is the third monoprint from that assignment:

Remember this little guy?

It now looks like this:

Making progress; I like the background...

I have more to do...but I'm getting there :-)

* Note: This mini-class has ended.

Painted a little painting...

using techniques I learned from Diane Culhane's online class, "Between Speech and Silence". I enjoy painting this way; it's very liberating and forgiving :-)

"Meeting"