L'Artiste Texture Painting (For The Love Of Art)

Hello there.

I have a new textured painting to share.  Well, ok, it was finished a month or two ago but it's new to you because you haven't seen it yet... unless you've been sneaking around my studio ;-)

This painting came about because I wanted to use one of my paint palette hearts.  I use paper palettes often to squeeze and/or mix my paint onto, and quite a while ago I really liked the way one of my paint palette papers (say that fast 5xs) looked, so I didn't want to throw it out.  It was loaded with globs of dried paint on both sides.  I remembered seeing some birds done by Robert Burridge in which he used dried paint globs that were peeled up from plastic (or something like that).  Very cool.  So, inspired, I cut the paint-loaded paper into a big heart shape, knowing that I'd use it sometime later in my art.

And that's just what I did.  I glued the heart onto a canvas with heavy gel medium, then proceeded to add texture all over the canvas with the medium.

I also glued down some lace, dried flower pods from the tree in our front yard, a very old square nail, and  a bit of mesh.  

 I was struggling with the colors on this for a bit.  There were so many colors on the heart that I wasn't sure which color(s) to bring out.  In the very bad photo below you can see what it looked like for a bit, kind of a terra-cota color.  I ended up painting it mostly red after that (no photo) and hated it, so I painted most of it out with an off-white.  

I love how it looks with the red peeking through, not as the main focus.  To make it all blend together better I went over the heart with the white also.  I'm really loving the red/cream combo!

This piece to me is about my love of being an artist.  

There's nothing like it. 

 I love being able to paint and play, and to know that it's what I am meant to do.  

It is truly a blessing!