paint your bliss

Blom True Online Class: Week 1 Part 1

2012-02-10T12:05:00.000-08:00

I'm participating in the online "Bloom True" course taught by abstract painter Flora Bowley, and it's been fun so far. We've done some yoga exercises to loosen up, and Flora has posted several painting prompts, instructional videos, and words of wisdom and encouragement to keep us going. The painting above is a "drip paint" background. Flora encouraged us to use hot colors but I couldn't help adding some quinacridone magenta along with my red paint!

The second exercise was much more fun, because I've dripped paint on lots of canvases, ho-hum, but it's been decades since I've finger painted! Again, Flora told us to use only hot colors but I'm not too crazy about orange or yellow, so I used red and purple. Finger painting on a canvas is a hoot! I love stroking and caressing the surface with my painty hands.

The painting above is an old failure that I decided to cover up with some finger painting so I can use it as a canvas start. I guess as long as acrylic paint exists, we can always find ways to transform our previous failures into new beginnings with some potential.

On this old turquoise canvas, I finger painted with dark violet and then added some metallic bronze. Why not?

An old painting first done in black and titan buff has just received a quick application of quinacridone magenta mixed with metallic bronze. I like it much better now!

Altogether it's been a fun day in the studio, with no expectations as I play with paint. I can't say that I have learned any new techniques yet (technically, I did finger-paint back in grammar school!) but it's been fun. Once my canvases have dried it will be time to go for the next layer of paint, this time using cool colors.
Happy Painting,
Sharilyn

Book Review: One Drawing a Day

2012-01-20T13:53:00.000-08:00

I absolutely love this book!
If you're just beginning to draw and sketch, the author's gentle approach will appeal to you. Her own drawings are loose and sketchy, fully of energy and personality -- no tight, perfect renderings here. She starts you out with some valuable instruction on setting up a basic home studio and assembling a kit for working on location, and her first exercise is a very easy still-life setup. The author also suggests trying different drawing tools such as a dip pen, bamboo pen, charcoal, watercolor brush, as well as graphite pencils and pens. Her "try this" approach to teaching is engaging for beginners as well as refreshing and inspiring for more advanced sketch artists and illustrators.
I also enjoy the fact that this book is full of eye-candy: lots and lots of colorful drawings and paintings by the author and other contributing artists, with a gallery of artists' drawings and paintings in the back.
Whether you're a novice or a more advanced artist seeking new creative exercises to inspire you, I think you'll get a lot out of One Drawing a Day. The lessons are fun, practical and inspiring, the artwork is top-notch, and the accompanying text is not only instructional but provides fascinating insight into the background behind the art. After reading this book, I felt a kinship with the author and the seven artists who contributed their drawings and ideas.
Each exercise challenges us to try something new, and to see our surroundings in new ways. For example, on page 59 you'll find exercise 20, drawing crowds of people. "The main thing is to look for the body language of the people and at how the crowd has a shape of its own. Don't find yourself drawing each person separately: Notice how one shape of a person connects to the other." What a fantastic way to approach drawing on location! I never thought of drawing "shapes of crowds" before, but I'm sure that I will do so from now on. And this is just one of the many tips the author shares throughout One Drawing a Day.
As I said before, I really love this book, and I think you will too. It's definitely a keeper!
Happy Painting (and Drawing!),
Sharilyn

Photographing with Painting in Mind

2012-01-03T12:27:00.000-08:00

Conversing with my artist friend Gwen Gibson the other day, we had the most fascinating and fruitful discussions. We covered many subjects related to art, marketing, and making a meaningful life during stressful times. One of the subjects that resonated for me the most had to do with photography.
Gwen told me about her sister, who regularly bicycles throughout France with a very expensive camera, which she uses to chronicle her travels with gorgeous photography on her blog.
"But I don't take those types of photos," Gwen told me. "My pictures aren't much to look at. I'm taking shots with drawing and painting in mind." What did she mean by that? I think it's a great topic for a blog post, so that's why I chose it for my first post on this blog in 2012.
To my mind, for the artist there are three main purposes for taking photos. One is simply to take a beautiful shot, which may be matted and framed, perhaps even sold in a gallery. The photo above is a picture I took in late 2005 of the Neuschwanstein Castle. It's a very nicely composed photo, ready to frame. It might even fit the second criteria for taking photos: photo reference.

The photo above shows a detail from a door, which I shot while in Italy last August/September teaching an art course. I take tons of these photos whenever I travel and even right here at home. As a photo, it isn't anything much. I wouldn't mat and frame it.
But it serves a wonderful purpose as photo reference, something that I might sketch and place into a collage of other images, or crop and alter in various ways, print out, and paste into a collage, or use as a photo transfer.
I might also use this image in some way to create a new piece of jewelry, such as a pair of earrings or a brooch. There are many, many creative possibilities, so does it matter to me that the photo isn't going to win any prizes at the town fair? Not a bit.

Here's a picture of Rosie, a frequent subject for my photography at home. She's used to having my camera (in this case I used my iPhone 4) in her face. As a photo, it's rather ordinary. The image of her face might work as photo reference, something I could sketch or alter in PhotoShop and use in a collage. But my main purpose for taking this photo was to capture a unique composition. In other words, like my friend Gwen Gibson recommended, I took this photo with painting in mind.
To get an idea of how this photo might work as a painting, I altered it in my new favorite iPhone app, Percolator. Here's the first image I captured:

Wow, psychedelic! But it's interesting. I'm going to keep working on it.

I like this one much better. Rosie's distinctive features are more arresting, and yet her body and background are left to the imagination. I might be able to use this to create an interesting abstract painting.

The photo above breaks up the image a bit more. I love the intermixing of various colors; would never have considered using purple to paint my silver-gray tabby!

This alteration, called overlapping circles, suggests more possibilities and looks more painterly. It's a great reference for a nicely composed sketch or painting.

This one might be my favorite. I just love the way you can really see Rosie's face, but the rest of the image is broken up into abstract rings and subtle colors. It might even work as a finished image, ready to mat and frame. So we're back to square-one!
But again, what I love about photographing with painting in mind is that this approach stimulates my brain with creative possibilities. Composition is a challenge for most two-dimensional artists, so taking lots of photos of ordinary objects (with apologies to Rosie), just trying to capture an interesting composition, is very helpful.
So is sketching compositions. I read a book recently on composition for oil painting, and the best advice I found in the entire book was this: Every day, make little tiny composition sketches in your sketch book. Don't try to make finished drawings. Instead, capture values and the placement of objects within the frame of your quick sketch. Do at least 10 little one-minute composition sketches every day, and you'll be amazed at how adept you become at composing larger paintings, collages, art quilts, etc.
Good advice... I like this idea, almost as much as I love altering my photos in Percolator!
Happy Painting,
Sharilyn

Painting Color Combos: Inspired by My Shower Curtain

2011-12-22T12:00:00.000-08:00

This is my shower curtain, just as it hangs. I love it: I love the illustrative motifs, I love the colors, and I love the fact that I got it on sale!
While I have no aspirations to paint in this style, I thought I might use the colors in my shower curtain to inspire a new painting. Lots of bloggers use this gadget to create a color palette from an existing object, but until now I've never given it much thought. Here's what I've come up with so far:

Quite autumny (if that's a word), so I thought I'd try capturing different areas of the fabric in more detail to see how it would change the suggested palette. Here's one:

And here's the new palette suggestion:

I like this one much better!

Here's another closeup:

And a new palette suggestion:

Hmmmm.... not so crazy about it. Let's try one more:

The final palette suggestion:

Of the four suggested palettes, I go for number 2 because the colors suggest autumn without being too somber. I love the berry-red, olive-green, and deep-ochre. Would never have considered adding baby-blue to that, but somehow it works. Not as sure about the shell-pink, but perhaps it's worth a try....
Happy Painting,
Sharilyn

Canvas Start

2011-12-20T12:00:00.000-08:00

Some people are intimidated by the blankness of a white canvas, but I never am because I know that all paintings are created in layers of color and imagery. Because your first layer is rarely seen (although it may peek through the finished painting here and there), there is no fear of messing it up. Therefore, no fear of the blank canvas.
I start all of my canvases by painting on a layer of one color. Sometimes it's a dark color like the intensely hued dark-violet mat acrylic paint from Holbein that I used on this canvas. Sometimes it's a bright, hot color like yellow-orange. In the end, it really doesn't matter. Anything to cover up the white!
My next layer can be many things, including collaged papers, photos, or stenciled images in contrasting colors. Or I can keep it really simple, as I did with this canvas start. The base layer of violet was quickly brushed over with some turquoise acrylic paint mixed with lavender. In some areas, I thoroughly mixed the two paint colors but in other areas I allowed the turquoise to remain bright.
I left one off-center area alone. The dark spot of color suggests a composition, and I'm excited to see how this painting will turn out. I might save this one for my upcoming online class with Flora Bowley... check out her site and sign up! It's sure to be a blast.
Happy painting,
Sharilyn

An Altered Green Background

2011-12-19T12:01:00.000-08:00

In a previous post I showed a too-bright green painting that I had made by painting over an old "failed" painting created a year ago in a portrait painting workshop. I mentioned that this was a good way to rescue an expensive sheet of watercolor paper that had been heavily textured and then ruined with a bad painting. Simply paint over it... but sometimes, even the overpainting is not satisfactory.
To save it again, I waited until the bright-green paint was completely dry and then squirted on some Dr. Ph. Martin's Spectralite liquid acrylic in dark violet. This paint is very fluid, more like ink than paint. It's also saturated with pigment, which immediately darkened the central area of my painting and pooled into all the textured areas.

The following images are closeups of the painting, which shows how I also went over the still-wet surface with a heavy application of turquoise acrylic paint (inexpensive Apple Barrel paint, I think the color is "Caribbean").

In some places, the turquoise acrylic mixes a bit with the dark violet ink-type paint, creating an interesting blend of lavender. You never know what you'll get when you start playing with paint...but if you want to avoid mixing hues, just let each layer of paint dry thoroughly before applying the next one.

In some areas, I deliberately applied a heavy dose of turquoise to brighten the purple while toning down the too-bright green.

In several areas, I allowed the green paint to peek through.

I like taking closeups of my background papers and canvases, as a way of giving me new perspective and prompting ideas for new compositions.
This is not a finished painting, but it's a nicely textured background in the process of evolving into something else....I may paint over most or even all of it by the time I finish. We'll see!
Happy painting,
Sharilyn

Turn Clean-Up Cloths into Art Cloths

2011-12-18T20:12:00.000-08:00

So what do you do when you've been painting lots of paper and your tables and drop-cloths are now full of spills and smears? How do you wipe off messy paint bottles and gooey paintbrushes?
Most painters use paper towels, but I use cotton or muslin fabric pieces for my clean-up cloths. The fabric wicks up the wetness better than a paper towel, and it also soaks up a lot of pigment that might have been wasted otherwise.
After a painting session is finished, I spread out my clean-up cloths on the canvas drop-cloth or on a worktable, and squirt a little Dye-Na-Flow liquid acrylic in the areas not smeared with paint. Then I let it dry or use a hair-dryer to hasten the process.
Heat-setting the fabric with an iron on the "cotton" setting makes the dyed fabric permanently colored and ready to give to friends who make quilts and other fabric arts. I'm not too handy with a sewing machine myself, so I prefer to give away my freshly dyed art cloths. My friends think I must be really keen on fabric dyeing, because I don't tell them that their new art cloth was first used to clean up my messy studio...
Happy Painting,
Sharilyn

Rescuing Old "Failed" Paintings

2011-12-16T19:44:00.000-08:00

This is just a quick post about rescuing old "failed" paintings—we've all got 'em!
Last January, I took a wonderful class with a teacher famed for her creative portraiture. I thought that I might enjoy working with faces, so I took the class with great anticipation.
Well, turns out I'm not particularly good at portraits! Over the course of a week, I made lots and lots of failures. All on very expensive 300# cold-press watercolor paper that I could never bring myself to throw away.
So I set them aside in my cabinet, where they sat for several months.

Flash-forward to this week, when I decided to see what I could do with my failed paintings. I certainly couldn't use them as they were. Trust me, the paintings were ugly! But a quick squirt of cheap Apple Barrel craft paint mixed with a bit of Dye-Na-Flow acrylic paint, and my papers were quickly and easily transformed!
I allowed some of the old paint layer to show through (that's the purple you see), and I used a soft brayer to squish the paint around. I pressed bubble wrap into the wet surface here and there. I also scraped the surface with a rubber comb that I made using a shower squeegee (more on that in a later post).
Wa-la, new painted paper backgrounds that I look forward to using in a future painting project!

Wow, this one's bright! But that's OK because it's background paper, which means that I'll be painting and/or collaging over it with layers and layers of glazes, stenciled and stamped images, paint, collage materials, image transfers, and who knows what else. It's just background paper, so I can do whatever I want with it without fear of ruining my painting, or creating another failure.
And if I do make another failed painting, I'll just brayer-drip-splash-comb-spatter over it again!
Happy Painting,
Sharilyn

The Case for Using Cheap Paint

2011-12-15T19:16:00.000-08:00

Now, don't get me wrong. I love expensive paint—it's richly pigmented with an array of colors you cannot find anywhere else, colors that are sometimes almost impossible to mix yourself. In the long run, expensive "artist grade" paints are a good value because you get more pigment or colorant dispensed in the fluid than with craft paint, so fewer layers are needed to achieve the same coverage.
This is why I always encourage my students to use the best paints that they can reasonably afford. Some of my favorite acrylic paint brands include Golden, Daniel Smith, Holbein, and Jacquard Products. They're all more expensive than the "kiddy" paint you'll typically find at your neighborhood craft store, but they're well worth the investment.
However, I made an exception when I found this Apple Barrel craft paint at my local WalMart a couple of years ago: on sale for $1 per 8-ounce bottle! You cannot beat that price with a stick, so I bought a bottle in every color. I think I got about 24 colors in all, too many to show in the photo above.
Then I went home and wondered what in the world I had just done. I'm blessed with a big studio, but even my space is limited and the last thing I needed was a whole bunch of cheap paint. What was I going to do with it?
I had no idea.
Well, I could always donate it to a local school if things didn't work out...
Flash-forward to this week, about two years after buying all that paint, which has sat unused in my cabinet ever since. Why not use it to paint some background papers? And as it turned out, this paint is just perfect for that!
So here's my case for using cheap paint (sometimes): It's likely to be just fine for creating background papers or for painting backgrounds on canvases. Even if two or three coats are needed, it's still a great use for the paint. I wouldn't want to use my favorite Golden paints to create backgrounds that will be painted over later, and hardly show. Seems a shame to waste expensive paint that way!
My one caveat is that the Apple Barrel line seems to be almost too pretty... it's not available in serious, dreary colors, so some people may not be drawn to it. But my motto is "Paint Your Bliss," and right now my bliss is bright, sunny, happy colors that make me smile.
I hope you're painting your bliss today!
Happy Painting,
Sharilyn

Making Monoprints with a Canvas Drop-Cloth

2011-12-13T19:08:00.000-08:00

Making monoprints is not a new idea, but have you ever monoprinted by using the leftover paint spills on your canvas drop-cloth? I recently did, and I love the results!
What happened was this: Because I was painting several half- and full-size sheets of watercolor paper in one session, I quickly ran out of room on my studio tables. So while some sheets dried on the tables, I spread out a big sheet of canvas drop-cloth with a rubber backing onto my studio floor, and began painting more sheets of paper on that.
Well, it didn't take long before my drop-cloth was smeared with drips and puddles of richly pigmented paint, which I really hate to waste. What to do?
I simply laid clean sheets of watercolor paper on top of the puddles, and then used a hard brayer to press the paper firmly into the puddled paint. This is an easy way to clean up your drop-cloth while transferring pigment to papers that can be used later as painting "starts," otherwise known as background papers.
Cool!
Happy Painting,
Sharilyn

Welcome to my new blog: Paint Your Bliss!

2011-12-12T20:39:00.000-08:00

Welcome to my new blog: Paint Your Bliss!
Since I made a commitment to paint more papers and canvases this year—especially over the winter, which is likely to be very dark and cold up here in the mountains—I thought, why not blog about my experiments? This way, I can chronicle my progress and share my discoveries with you.
So what is "Paint Your Bliss" all about? For me, it's this: Paint what makes you happy. Use colors and color-combinations that you like, for no other reason than that you like them. That should be enough. Paint wooden bird houses or paint big canvases, paint portraits or posies or abstract expressionist modern art. Paint what you love... paint your bliss!
The papers pictured above are all half-sheets of Fabriano Artistico 300# cold-press watercolor paper, painted with Dye-na-Flow (a liquid acrylic paint from Jacquard Products) and some cheap craft paints that I picked up at WalMart a couple of years ago. More on that in a future post!

I had fun layering squirts of paint, pressing bubble-wrap into the painted surface, spraying it with water (and also with 91-percent rubbing alcohol), running a brayer over it numerous times, and generally just playing around.

The paper pictured above was a failed acrylic painting, freshly brayered-over with a thick layer of inexpensive craft paint. Some of the old painting peeks through in places, which will make for interesting layers of painted imagery.

Gotta love this one, it's full of bright color. And that's just what I need when the sun goes down by 5 pm and it's chilly and not particularly inspiring around here. I do live in a beautiful place, but the mountains are really, really cold right now! Working with sunny-hued paints cheers me up considerably.

More fun with pouring, waiting until the paint is nearly dry, and then rolling a brayer over it firmly to squish the paint around. I do love to play with paint...
Happy Painting,
Sharilyn