Saturday, April 18, 2020

All the Time in the World Now Until I Run Out of Blue

This isolation thing is strange.  Now that I have time to do whatever I have materials on hand for, often there is no desire to do it.  But I forced myself to do a little painting and once I got going it was fun.  There are no end of tutorials out there that explain things, and I did a lot of copycat art in just a few days.
I have many part bottles of acrylic paint and decided that the saying is true, The only paint that is wasted is what remains in the tube, unused.
I had a stash of canvases garnered from years of experimental painting, and a few picked up from the Reuse Center in Edmonton.  So I took plain old wall paint and gave them a good coat.  I put enough on the first one, as you can see, to scrape off and put on the second. I brushed it out as smoothly as I could and set them aside to dry.  There is a certain amount of texture that shows through but this is a learning curve. Reuse, repurpose, and so on.
Then I went to my Pintrest file where I saved all the paintings I loved and throwing inhibitions to the wind, followed the tutorials.
This one was off a site of Paint With Len Hend.  He has a number of free tutorials that are quite easy to follow, and I learned three valuable lessons from him. 
1. Keep cleaning your brush
2. Dark colours to the corners and
3. Good enough is good enough. If you can't cover it with a tree don't muck with it.  Carry on.
He says in this particular video to make the painting your own.  Well, the general form and the background followed his but when it came to trees...my brush refused to paint Aussie trees and made spruce instead.  Oh well.
I need to learn to subdue the colours a bit but I'm learning.
This one is kind of a memory picture of the creek that ran past our farm. The one acrylic I didn't copy.





This was my last painting and I think I was getting a little tired after about four days of intense work and I don't like it as well.  I think I will try again one day when I replenish my supply of blue.  I only have cerulean and turquoise left and while they are beautiful colours they don't always work out.


One day while visiting on Facetime I brewed two teabags into a small cup of water and forced myself to put down layer after layer of tea, allowing it to dry in between.  A good lesson in patience for someone who likes to smack down thick paint and push it around with a palette knife.
Interesting, but very unstable, if it gets a drop of water the tea dissolves and remakes the shapes.  

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