Summer of Colour Week 4

This week's colours are two reds and a metalic- very sensual.  I used cad red and crimson red and gold paint (the vertical text). 

I used turquoise underneath as a cool complement to these warm colours and allowed it to show through in the shaped areas.  The painting is collage and acrylic, 10" x 10" on canvas.

I learned a lot with this painting and I felt I had a break-through in my quest to be more painterly and less precise.

Spirals

I love to reference the Golden Mean in my paintings, it is something I consider when putting a composition together, whether on canvas or when photographing something.  I have been doing it for so long now, it is almost automatic.

Unable to quite bend a flexi-rule to a neat spiral, I decided to make some out of wire.  I shall call them Spirulers(c), heh-heh, patent pending!

New Canvas Works

I am continuing to work on the ideas from my mindfulness sketchbook pages.  I am still working on the boundaries in the landscape subject and the sketchbook pages are an extension of that. 

I am specifically looking at the shapes that fields form, I love how no matter how hard the farmer tries, they are never square due to things like hillocks, burns, buildings, pylons, rocks, uneven ground.  The shapes of the fields are endlessly fascinating to me.

So drawing those shapes and expanding on them became a great exercise in meditation and the results are now creeping into my everyday work.

It is harder to go bigger, so I am doing it gradually, from 6 or 7 inch square in my previous post to one that is 10inches square and one that is 16inches square.  I am challenging myself with the square format to see how the shapes work.  I don't want them plonked in the middle, so I am experimenting with the placement of them as well.  I also want to do some long thin formats too.

More ideas than time, as usual!

The first one is more or less finished, it is 10"x10" and very precise.  I worked in a very strict, planned manner, drawing things out before transferring them to the canvas and keeping the paint as even as I could.

The second one, is still in progress, sorry for the slightly fuzzy photo, even though we have daylight until the wee hours here in Scotland, we do have cloud and that has reduced the light quality. 

Here I have worked in a much more intuitive way, applying paint, oil pastel and charcoal and letting the shapes form themselves.  I am also applying the paint in a more textured manner.  Although much harder to work this way, I do find it more satisfying and more painterly.

I still have a way to go with this, but I like how it is progressing.

Summer of Colour - Week 3

Actually finishing earlier this week, here are two pieces completed for the Summer of Colour challenge using two purples and a yellow.  The first one I use the purples with just a touch of yellow and the second one uses a wash of yellow over the entire painting, apart from the reserved shapes, with more layers of yellow in some selected areas.

I couldn't choose a favourite, so I am including both!

Here are the mixes I used:  The darker purple is ultramarine and magenta, the lighter purple is cerulean, magenta and white and the yellow is cad yellow medium with a little white.

The Bigger Picture

In yesterday's post, I showed you a painting for Summer of Colour that I made in two pinks and orange.  What I didn't show you, was the bigger picture - the image was just part of a larger whole.

Here is the larger painting in progress, you can see, I have already made changes to the parts shown yesterday.

There is much more still to be done, but I am loving the process.  It is an extension of the ideas that have been forming during my mindfulness sketchbook sessions and it is such fun to be able to get them onto a larger canvas (well, board in this case) at last.

Summer of Colour WK2

Working on board this time, out of the sketchbook for a change, here is this week's Summer of Colour painting.  The colours we were to work with are two pinks and an orange.




















I have been using pastels and acrylics and these are my chosen colours: magenta, pale pink and flourescent orange.

It is a lovely colour-scheme, apparently a big hit in previous years, I can see why.
 

Mindfulness Sketchbook Pages

Things are still very busy in these parts, but I am managing to find time to work in my sketchbooks during my mindfulness sessions, here are a couple of pages that I finished recently.

I really enjoy doing these and am looking forward to experimenting with them on a larger scale soon.