I thought I had already showed you one of these paintings but apparently not. I did post a photo of the first painting on Instagram. I have been playing with stripes for my Level 3 Art & Design class. I liked how the watercolor stripes on wet paper gave an organic look like trees. So I wondered if I could recreate the effect with acrylic paint on canvas.

This is my first attempt. I didn’t really mix any of these colors, they were straight out of the bottle. I used a lot of water to get the paint to spread and many layers of paint.

Here’s a closer view. Click on the photo to see the textures. This was an old painting that I covered with gesso. It had a lot of texture on it before and now that I look at the close up photo, I really like those extra textures. For my second attempt, I used a new canvas. And it didn’t have that extra texture and although I like the second attempt, it would have been better with a textured background.

For my next attempt, I wanted to add some green and I wanted to see what would happen if I mixed my neutrals from red and green. I knew with the added water that the colors would separate out but I thought that might make it more interesting.

Perhaps you can see in this close up that the dark background stripes in the second painting are dark green. They are black in the first painting. I have some other ideas about how to take this idea further and I would really like to try stripes with deconstructed screen printing on felt. But I don’t have time to do that now. I am back to my class next week. So I’ll have to keep those ideas on the back burner for a bit. Thanks for stopping by and have a good weekend!