HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

To all my visitors...thank you for visiting my blog and special thanks to those who took the time to leave comments and feedback. It means a great deal to me. The image above is the last Christmas card I painted which, as predicted, I finished just in time for the holidays.

Making Christmas Cards

This year I decided not to do cards for printing. My printer is acting up again and I don't want to pay a print shop right now. Instead I'm painting individual cards for immediate family and I've worked all afternoon on just these two. What have I gotten myself into?! Of course this is a labor of love and I want them to be special for each person. These are the two 'guy' cards I've created for the men in my family. I used black, some muted colors, plaid, metallics...guy stuff. I'm not the least bit concerned about minor imperfections. They are homemade after all and come from the heart. I have to add that crafters impress me more and more. I'm not terribly crafty anymore. If I ever decide to make handmade cards full time I would definitely have to develop a better system.

Pat's Sunflower~center reworked

This painting won't be going to market but I've sure had some fun with it. I used white acrylic gesso and dabbed it on the center of the flower with a small brush. My goal was to recover all the texture I lost in the first go-around. Today I went over the gesso with color. I didn't follow the reference too closely, instead putting various colors wherever I thought they looked good to me. I used a mixture of watercolor and fluid acrylic this time but stayed with the original palette. I truly like the results and would do this again, the next time a little wiser for my trouble.

Thinking in the Negative & Looking for Shapes

It's a school of fish! I'm not sure what kind of fish(?)but all kinds from the look of it. I simply 'picked out' the shapes I saw. I see even more now that I look at this on screen. Can you see the other fish?

Here I've expanded on my original landscape and tweaked some areas.

I'm still playing with the negative painting. It's also fascinating to look at random shifts in color and value on a piece of paper and pick out shapes. That's something I've never tried before but always wanted to attempt. It seems these two approaches go well together. The other obvious lesson one can glean from negative painting is the use of values and color to create depth. The darker or cooler the color the more it recedes. The brighter or warmer the color the more it moves forward.