New Year, New Art: Make it Count

Hi there.

It's already time for another Paint Party Friday!

Man... a week can go by very quickly!  Well, weird thing is it seemed to fly by, yet it took forever for Friday to get here.  Hmmm...  anybody know what I mean, or am I the only crazy one around here?  Wait.. what am I saying?  You're a bunch of artists too so enough said!  ;-)

I've had several art pieces done for a while, just waiting to be shared but I just haven't had the time post them.  I was going to explain all this in an Orloff household update, but decided to make that a separate post so as not to bore all you PPF peeps!  So today I'll just share this one painting and bore the rest of you later!

I started this piece on New Years Eve as inspiration for 2012.  Last year was an interesting one, so I'm rather happy for a fresh new year all full of possibilities.  

To start this piece, I printed out one of my photos and glued it down onto a 7"x9" mat board.  I added texture with heavy gel medium by Golden, and once dry I used a pen to draw over parts of the photo to pop some details out.  I then used Golden fluid acrylics to blend with the colors in the photo.

I used paint to stamp out the words "A fresh start, shiny and new.  Make it count", and glued them to the canvas using the heavy gel medium.  I added a bit of the same colors around the words to blend them in a bit... and voila!  Done!

This piece came together rather easily for me.  I love when that happens!  I hope it inspires and reminds you (and me!) to really take advantage of this new year and "make it count"!

Happy Paint Party Friday everyone!  To join in with your own painted projects or see the list of links for who else is painting along, click here.

Turquoise Crackle Bird Collage

Hi there.  I've got a fun little collage to show you.  It has tons of texture, turquoise, AND a bird.  How could you go wrong with that combo?!

It was a gift for my blog friend Mandy.  She won a drawing I had a little while back and I was so happy that she won.  She was with me from the very beginning of my blog and ever since then she's been one of my biggest cheerleaders.  I wanted to reward her with more than just the 4 greeting cards that she won, so I made this little birdie collage especially for her.  

I had enlarged and then printed out parts of my "Branching Out" painting onto watercolor paper for another project and had some left over.  I thought that it would be the perfect base to start a collage.  I glued down a small strip of a vintage dictionary page across the background.  I then drew out the bird silhouette onto paper and cut it out, then brushed Distress crackle paint onto it and set it aside to dry.  

What is that pretty strip of scalloped goodness going across the center you ask?  Sometimes I wipe excess paint from brush onto an index card, and if I like how it looks when it's all covered in paint I keep it to use in a collage.  Quite a while back after one was all covered and gritty with dark metallic grey and turquoise paint I used it to test out a new border punch that I bought.  I loved how it looked with the paint splotches so I put it aside in my scrap box to use later on a project.  I knew it would be perfect for this.

After that was glued down, I tinted heavy gel medium a dark metallic grey, then I troweled it through a stencil. The photo below was taken with my iphone while the gel was still wet to see where to place the bird.  It was a bit too busy so I wiped some of the stenciled gel away before it dried.  Then I glued down the bird, added a bit of paint here and there over the back ground bits and outlined the bird to make it stand out more.  Phew.  Done!

I'm linking up with Paint Party Friday for the first time!!  I've been wanting to join in the fun but haven't been able to until now.  Whatever shall I wear? ;-)  If you'd like to join in with your own paint projects or just see what everyone's doing what click on the link above.  See you there!

New Textured Metallic Painting

I've got a new mixed media painting to show you.  It's textured.  It's metallic.  It's got lots of layers.

What does all that mean?  It means it's one of the world's hardest paintings to photograph and get the colors accurate.  No... seriously.  The metallic pewter color (and a bit of copper) on this has such a pretty luminous glow to it, not the harsh shiny metallic,... but is a PAIN to photograph!  Trust me on this.  I had the same problem with my "Chemistry of Copper" painting (same products).  Metallics are tough to photograph.  You want a bit of a glare to show the lustery goodness, but too much of a glare makes all the pretty colors go away... so it tends to either look too dark, or too washed out.  And because I'm Anal Annie when it comes to getting things right... I photographed this piece FIVE times over the last week.  Yup.

Wow.  Big tangent.

Anywho... here's my latest painting...The first photo at the top of this post seems to reflect more copper in the top right corner than it has in person, but the rest of it is pretty accurate... maybe.

Because I know you're like me (scary), I know you'd like to see this painting's ugly beginning.  It started as a scrap canvas... used to scrape leftover paint products onto so I didn't waste any.  Talk about yucky, but a nice way to start building texture for a future painting!

Oh boy, I just realized something.  I have about six paintings going right now... and half of them are done with these metallics... so I'm either going to...

1. get really frustrated photographing them and give up metallics

2. strangle myself

3. get really good at photographing metallics

or

4. loosen up my perfectionist nature and adopt a "eh... close enough" type attitude (HA!).  

Stay tuned to see what happens... I'm a bit curious myself  ;-)