Abstract Paintings and Musings on Art
It’s been a while since I did any new Organics paintings, but I cranked out a few new ones this past week. I started with an old one I hadn’t finished. Here it is completed:
I then did another painting per day for the next few days, continuing to explore similar themes as those that originally motivated this series from quite a few years ago. And here they are:
More posts of paintings to come in the near future. 🙂
Exploring some squiggly lines in 12×12 inch watercolor paintings.
It’s true, it’s true — really! The first in another new series of small paintings/drawings, these shapes were made without looking at the paper, based on images off of streaming TV. I did look, though, as I colored them in, so IDK, is that cheating? 🙂
aka “Rabbit’s Wardrobe in Disarray.”
This was my 5th piece of the year, and I’ve been holding off on sharing it. I am again combining some imagery from various series of the last few years, this time in watercolor pencil (with water added, of course). I may try to fix that purple-y bit in front, though quite honestly, I’m not sure if it can be fixed. I’m not crazy about the grainy quality that I accidentally achieved there. :\
For this painting, I picked a set of colors that were more subdued than my usual bright fare; I’m surprised at how bright they seem anyway.
The problem with working in watercolor is if you get the colors wrong, there’s not a lot you can do to fix it. Initially, I got the colors wrong on this one. I had painted the webby type stuff in the background twice, ending up with a kind of burnt sienna (red-brown) color on the third layer of webbery. Not only did it clash with the more jewel like colors of the foreground imagery, but it made the whole piece very busy, and you couldn’t really distinguish foreground from background.
Sooooo, I tried lifting the color with water (didn’t work well), then lightly with a sponge (nope), then with a bit of light and careful scrubbing with a sponge (better), and finally, I gave up all hope of making this piece work and washed it under running water.
Yes, I washed a watercolor painting. It’s on paper, you know. This is why I love the heavy Raffine “sketch” paper I’m using; it’s tough! And has a lovely texture. 🙂
I took care not to pill the paper as I lightly helped some of the paint off of it, let it dry, and then had to repaint most of the foreground “characters,” while adding a third. And now I rather like it.
Hope I don’t get myself into this predicament again, but if I do, I know what to do now.
After the crazy looseness and unpredictability of the Fraccidental series, my fingers itched for a bit of tightness, and this is what happened. Named after the earworm running through my head during the entire creation of this piece.
A few weeks ago, I started 3 new series of very small works on paper. The first series I’m calling “Fraccidental Paintings.” Well, they’re not really the first in this series, because I did about 4 of these in 2011.
I’m using watercolor and inks and a variety of other media on very wet paper, and the inks do really cool fractally things when they hit the paper (hence the title of the series).
Working this way is kind of like when I worked in encaustic: there are some things I have control over and some things I don’t. I should buy a video camera, so I can shoot this process; it’s really cool the way the pigments in the various media interact, and I especially like watching that moment when the ink overcomes a certain resistance and suddenly floods into the wetness of the paper. 🙂