This and That

Today we went to Deb’s house to add more layers to our experimental watercolors we made at my house about a month ago. I didn’t get any photos of the artwork but take a look at Deb’s pens.

You can’t even see all the colors here. Serious pen envy.

I have a new addition to the studio. I bought a used easel from one of my friends. It takes up way too much space but I want to continue on this painting journey I have been on so I thought it was a good time to get an easel.

I finally finished stitching my cedar trees. They will have a matt so I’ve photographed them with croppers. Now I need to find a new hand stitching project to work on.

 

Revamped Cards

I made these cards quite a while ago with scrap paper and poured acrylic skins. I put them in the store for sale and they haven’t sold. There has been minimal interest in them. So it was time to revamp and see if I could improve them.

So I looked in my notebooks where I put quotes that I like. I found enough quotes and then printed them out.

I then cut them out and pasted them to the already made card.

This one I had to redo because I misspelled happiness.

I hope that with these quotes, people will like the cards better.

People seem to like items/cards with words on them.

At least they have a “focal point” now.

Of course it would help if I could spell. Picasso on the card is wrong. Sigh. I have printed out another piece of paper with the correct spelling and will paste it over the first one. Now I’ll take these back to the store and see what happens.

Watercolor Experiments Continue

I am still experimenting with watercolors and seeing if I can create more abstract landscapes. I am still working small and about half of the experiments end up being acceptable. Some are still pretty ugly but I am learning. Definitely, less is more. And I have to learn when to stop. Less is more.

Here are three that were not as I had envisioned. But they’re OK.

These three are better. The one in the middle is an eco print that has been enhanced with watercolor and acrylics.

These two are my favorite ones from today. These are more abstract and not as overworked. I will be turning most of these into greeting cards as they are all small (5″ x 7″ range). Thanks for stopping by and have a good weekend.

Paint Party

Our group got together last week and did some of the experimental painting techniques that I have been trying out.

Everybody got right to work and created some “master pieces”.

These are the pieces as they are drying. Everybody, even with experimental kind of methods, has a different look to their work. Next time we meet, we are going to work further into some of these pieces to finish them. It will be interesting to see how they turn out.

Here is one of mine after I worked into it. The piece on the left is what I started with after letting the watercolors dry. The piece on the left is after working into the painting to give it a bit more definition in places. It’s fun to figure out what needs to be added and when to stop. That’s probably the hardest part for me 🙂

Winter Berries

I’m still playing with negative space painting. This was an experiment on a piece of screen printed paper that I had in my stash. It looked very organic to start with so I added some darkness behind the berries and leaves. It has both acrylic and water color paint and the paper was a “mixed media” paper that I have never really liked. And after working on it again, it has reaffirmed that I should never get this type of paper again. The paper feels almost like plastic and has a raised pattern on the surface that is hard to cover. I guess it should have gesso on it to start but since it was already printed, I just went over top of what was there. It is still going to take more practice to really get used to negative space painting. I feel the need to plan more as I have a tendency to get lost in the more intricate details. I painted a second landscape but it is really hideous at the moment and I have to work on it more to see if it is even salvageable.

And the rest of the day was spent packing up to go to my class soon. I have more stuff every time we go. Luckily, there are only 2 sessions left. Otherwise, we might have to rent a U Haul truck to get everything to class.