This is my second adventure in acrylics, a painting of my granddaughter, Lois. I think the acrylic quick drying property makes me work looser and ‘rougher’. There is not so much time to adjust and fiddle! I’ve added layers of course, but the smooth gradations that are easy in oil are difficult here.
I love the vibrancy of the colors.
Acrylic 9 x 12
I decided to try out acrylics as an oil alternative. I was given some Daniel Smith acrylics a few years ago (no longer made) and most of them are still in usable condition.
Over the summer I read Capturing Light in Acrylics by John Hammond, which I found very inspiring. I love his colors! (I found it first in a used bookstore on Portsmouth, NH asking price $30!) I ordered it on inter-library loan and enjoyed reading it.
I painted this picture with a burnt sienna wash undercoat and a burnt sienna monochrome underpainting. For a few days I could not decide how to paint the background, but after considering something much darker, settled on this green pattern of light.
The subject was my daughter, enjoying the feel of her new dress-up ballerina costume!
I have recently read ‘Atmospheric Watercolors’ by Jean Haines and I started a background with her methods. It was very loose and I used cling film to create textures. Then I superimposed a drawing of these roses on top and developed them using the colors from the ‘Red-Green ‘ palette in ‘Watercolor Harmony’ by Joyce Washor. They are still tighter and more detailed than shown in eitehr of these books! I don’t know if I can ever paint ‘loose’! (The ‘rose’ in the top left corner is mainly just the cling film pattern; I liked how it looked, so I just left it).
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As another part of my mother’s 80th birthday gift I collected some of her poems that she’s been writing over the past few years and made a book (using Shutterfly) of them. I used mainly photos to illustrate the poems, but I painted a couple of pictures especially for the book. This was one of them.
Her poem is about the strangeness and loneliness of being on your own after the loss of your spouse (my dad died in 2010), but has a hopeful refrain–‘but hey, the birds are still singing’. As I was musing over what to paint for this poem, I looked outside and saw this lovely bright yellow finch enjoying himself on our echinachea flowers. I quickly snapped several photos of him and then used several shots to compose this illustration. I love the brightness and hope of this idea.
Statue, 9 x 12, oil
I am in England visiting my mother for her 80th birthday. A few months ago she asked if my sister or I could paint this statue that she has in her garden. She bought it right after my dad died in 2010. I had a go at it, from a photo I’d taken several years ago, and gave her this as part of my gift to her.
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This is the statue as it looks today. The plantings have changed around it, so the foliage and colors look different. I rather like it as it is today, as it has more color and varied, interesting shapes. Should I paint it again?
Thirteen of my paintings are being displayed for the month of September in the Bellvue Gallery in Bloomington, IN. It is a small one-room gallery attached to The Farmer House Museum. We had an opening night on Sept. 2, where I played my harp and my son played his violin. We’ll have a closing evening on Sept. 30, when we will play more ‘family music’. I am thankful for the opportunity to have my paintings displayed publicly for a month!
Katherine and I sat in the van for 45 minutes one day so that I could paint this. (I felt very fortunate to I find a meter that already had a lot of time left on it!). The canvas I’d taped on the inside lid of my shoebox pochade had fallen off into the paint that I’d set out on the palette, leaving blobs of color all around the canvas! I wiped off the blobs as well as I could and then was happy to find that they incorporated into the painting in just the right places!
My attempts to paint en plein air on vacation apparently were contagious. One day Elizabeth and William both asked for some paper, brushes and paints and each spent a quiet and satisfying time creating a painting, although neither from their immediate surroundings. (Elizabeth’s was an imaginary camping scene based on our previous stops. We had just a couple of days earlier visited a museum in Bennington, VT, where they had a display of works by Grandma Moses (painted at ages 60-99!) and I think Elizabeth was thinking of those images. William’s was an abstract).
I’ve given both of them quite a bit of art instruction in the past, so they had a good idea where to start and how to proceed. Maybe it was the quietness of the campsite and my painting that pulled them; maybe the lack of other distractions and activities? I was also satisfied to see them create with paint.
We have just returned from a camping and kayaking vacation in the North East. I wrote this a few days ago, but had no opportunity to post it.
–We are camping in New Hampshire, in the depths of a magnificent forest. These campsites seem to me like God’s mansions in a fantastic natural setting. I brought watercolor on this trip instead of oils and this was a 30 minute study from our campsite picnic table this morning.
The trees are extremely tall, straight pines, with the lower branches being oak and beech. The pine scent all around is delicious!
I took a photo of this flower in my mother’s garden, but I don’t know what it is. The leaves I painted here don’t belong to this flower. They were also in my photo and I liked them in the design.
I thought I should be including the sizes of the paintings. Since reading ‘Daily Painting’ by Carol Marine last fall, I’ve been painting in smaller 6 or 8 inch sizes.
Watercolor, 6 x 6 ins
marymayhewart 