My Painting

It's been a long while since I've allowed myself to go into an art store (craft stores don't count). I mean a real art store, like Blick. The sort of magical place that teems with unleashed creative potential - isles and isles of color pencils the color of rainbows and brushes of all shapes and sizes. Rows of paper overflowing with options - rough, smooth, large, small, sketchbooks, pads for watercolors, charcoal, chalks...

ooooh, look! I pulled it out of storage and put it on an easel.. I must be getting serious now...

I love perusing those isles; love imagining the masterpieces that each blank canvas can become. I love the way the place smells. I love all the brightly packaged toys that beg to come home with me. Basically, I'm like a kid in a candy store: I just love it. The trouble is, it seems like every time I go into a real art store, I come out with at least one canvas (if not several.. plus some color pencils or a new brush). Consequently, for my wallet's sake, I don't actually visit very often.

All unwrapped and ready to go!

Each time I purchase a canvas, there's always some fabulous plan for what I intend to paint on it (though, in reality, I tend to get distracted and the canvas gets tucked away in some corner to await its special day of fulfilling the measure of its creation). Recently I've been doing some rearranging of furniture and shifting around things all over my house. Along the way, I've discovered a few canvases I may or may not have forgotten I had.

Color, at last! This base coat only took 3-4hrs to dry...

However, the stirring up of my house as also stirred up some major creative juices which has brought about the metamorphosis of my largest canvas.

Since it was so large, I decided it should be a bright and vibrant sort of painting. I've always loved paintings that have texture and visible brush strokes, to portray energy and motion, so I thought I'd incorporate that with this painting too.

using a brand new technique.. hooray for google!

And for some extra fun, I applied this layer of paint with a palette knife rather than a brush. (also known as impasto painting).. I loved the effect! Lots of swirling and lots of texture. It kind of reminds me of a wave kissing a beach.

Shades of yellow and orange are fun, but I wanted to add some more visual interest to this painting, I opted to go the "mixed media" route, and added some colorful buttons to the mix.

Originally, I was just going to have the buttons on the wave of shades of orange, however, I felt the color contrast was too stark, it needed something to help the eye transition from the light, warm colors to the darker, cool colors: swirls of spring green!

 Check out all that texture! Whereas the other layer took 3-4hrs to dry, this one took 3-4 days...

I have to admit, I was terribly impatient for this painting to dry. Partially this was so I could show it off 'cuz I love the way it turned out! But also, it took much longer than I excepted to be fully dry. Originally, I opted for acrylics (they're easy to clean up) but they dry way faster than oils. However, I discovered that when you glob on the paint, it still takes a few days to dry... still, 4 days is infinitely better than 2-4 weeks.

And, just for fun, another close-up of the texture completely dried:

And here it is! All completed and all dry. Wohoo! I think it looks great!