Sometimes we as artists experience awesome growth in our experimenting stages. I sure did in recent weeks. Combing techniques and pushing my thoughts on compositions has been very fun and quite honestly calming to my over sensitized brain right now. (I am a public school teacher by day so....)
Working with familiar subject matter is always a comfortable place for me to be. Silly flowers, birds and bikes are often my starting points for all things new. The layering of wax on top of the vibrant watercolors is so yummy I can hardly stand it. The smell, the carving, the accidental extra markings make my heart go MORE. Let's make more!
I mean look at this above...Those dashes? the brush marks. Yes. I am all in on this.
So then I try some whimsical abstracts. Pushing my brain a tad as I really really want to see something in art. I have a difficult time truly appreciating abstract art. Perhaps it's because I've never tried it...so this is about as abstract as I can get. Shapes interlocking. And well, again I was very pleased with the outcome.
So these paintings might be a teensy be deceiving in size on tiny squares in instagram and even here on the website. In actuality they have all been painted on 10" square deep cradled canvases. And all of them turned out very well. I was very excited and ready to move to the next stage....going big. Because let's face it, size does matter. And truth be told it can take me sometimes as long to paint a tiny piece as a big piece, so that's really not the best way to price out my work. Even though it's perceived- small means cheaper and big means more expensive to most non-creative minds. Anyhoo...pricing art is a conversation for another day.
Saturday Billy and I hit Ponce City Market so I could purchase larger wooden panels and not have shipping (plus we love it there and can eat our way through the venue). Now these panels are MUCH pricier. Already I am in deeper with costs. Plus I have to gesso them with at least 2 coast which also is more bank.
I started a composition today and immediately realized that painting big with watercolors on encaustic gesso was going to be an epic fail. On the smaller pieces this didn't really present an issue, but I suppose going bigger the wet applied to the encaustic gesso made a mucky mess. You can see all my brush strokes and the colors I mixed for the piece I wanted ended up tinted with the gesso pulling up. Not the colors I wanted. It's weird. Sigh....
I was able to paint a fun flower composition I will show once completed. I wasn't trying to cover as much area so the single strokes didn't pull the gesso up. This is kinda the ugly stage of my process I'd rather not show right now. So, now what to do about the rest of the boards I have gessoed? Not sure. I mean I can use encaustic colored waxes on them. I just really liked my watercolors and wax technique.
Hey...I tried. Experimenting and pushing my creative boundaries is what growth is all about. Right?
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