"30 Days" - Rose #20

Rose #20 is the second rose from the left in the second row from the bottom.

I started with a purple layer, then added a light blue over the areas I wanted to highlight.

Then I added layers of magenta and yellow-orange.

I darkened the shadows with a darker purple colored pencil.

And I went over the highlights with a cream colored pencil, also using this pencil to blend some of the colors together a little better.

Here is the whole drawing so far, up through rose #20.

"30 Days" - Rose #19

I started the 4th row of my 22"x30" colored pencil drawing with rose #19.

First, I drew outlines of rose #19 and #20.

Then I colored in the petals of rose #19 with a light peach color, and added in layers of orange and pink over the top.

I went over areas of the rose where I wanted to play up more of a yellowed/brown coloring with a yellow-orange colored pencil.

Then I lightened the whole rose with a cream colored pencil (paying special attention to the highlights on the edges of the petals), and went over the yellow shadows more with a reddish-brown.

I added in some more orange on top, and made sure all the colors were blended together.

Row #4 will have five more roses, and then row #5 will have the final six. Just 11 more to go!

"Finding a Proverbial Mountain" - Finished Acrylic Painting

This 12"x12" acrylic painting was started in July. Nearly five months later, it is finally finished! It is now available for purchase here on Etsy.

It took so long for two reasons: 1) I often put it on the back burner while I worked on other things, like editing my novel and working on colored pencil drawings. And 2) I built up more layers on this painting than I did on my previous acrylic paintings (the Cloud Atlas Sextet), working over the same areas again and again until I achieved the look I wanted.

First, I put down some gestural strokes, to figure out where the flowers were going to go. I built up the flowers, layer by layer, to make them (and the shadowy background) more dimensional. I added details to the flowers, outlining a few petals. I added white and black stripes in the background. Then, I put those black and yellow patterns over many of the flowers, weaving them in and out of space so that they appeared and disappeared throughout the flower field.

Finally, I added in some final details. I went over the yellow pattern one more time to conceal any darker paint underneath that was still visible under the first layer. I also added some orange back in to many of the petals, so that the painting wouldn't be quite so bright/"caution yellow."

I also added in a few splotches of paint (yellow dabs, and white dabs), just very subtly into the background, and finished it off with some lighter (almost white) highlights on a few petals.

Here is the final painting:

How yellow this painting appears depends on the light of the room. In a darker room, it does look more yellow (the yellow pattern and yellow flowers blend together more). But in a room with lots of natural light (like my dining room with the window curtains pulled open, as we see in the photos below), it is a little more neutral. The brownish/tan/orange shadows and background colors are more obvious, as our the white highlights on the petals.

The paint wraps around the side of the canvas, so that when it is hung on the wall the edges that are visible are not white.

Despite all the details and time that went into this, it's a fairly small painting. It's only 12"x12", which means it would easily fit in any room. Here's a photo of my hand next to the painting, for size comparison:

This painting is available for purchase here on Etsy.

"Finding a Proverbial Mountain" - Adding in the Pattern

Last month, I posted these two blog posts (I & II) about adding dimension and detail to my 12"x12" acrylic painting, "Finding a Proverbial Mountain."

In the weeks since, I have finally finished this project! So this week I will be posting the last few step-by-step photos, and then several photos of the completed painting.

As I mentioned at the end of those last posts, the only thing left to do was add in the black and yellow patterns. This took a little bravery - because it was a super-contrasty, obvious part of the painting, and because it was going right on top of several of the flowers that I spent several hours perfecting. If I messed it up too much, it would not only "ruin" the rest of the painting (it would be so difficult and time-consuming to reconstruct the flowers that I liked underneath it!), but also be really obvious, because of its dark color.

I could've just left it as is (and I considered that), but my goal was always to add in the pattern eventually, and I considered the pattern a crucial part of the painting - not just for composition reasons, but for symbolic reasons. I named this painting "Finding a Proverbial Mountain" after a phrase I saw written in the journal of someone close to me, where she expressed how frustrated, upset, and angry she was. She wanted to "find a proverbial mountain and let out a proverbial scream." Without the stark chain-like pattern, it would just be a painting of a pile of overlapping Black Eyed Susans - pretty, but not exactly what I had in mind.

As it is, I don't think it really gets across much frustration or anger, but the pattern does add at least a little bit of conflict.

I knew the black pattern wouldn't look perfect, and there are parts that look a little shaky. But it's a hand-painted pattern, painted with a medium-thickness brush on canvas, so it was always going to look that way. Besides, if I wanted it to look perfect, I would've just used the digital composition I created in Illustrator/Photoshop, rather than recreating it by hand on canvas. It has a hand-made tactile quality that proves it's a unique, one-of-a-kind painting, and not something made digitally.

Once I had the black pattern down, I painted the yellow pattern over the top. I also added some more yellow highlights to some of the petals, to help the super-bright yellow pattern blend into the flowers a bit more.

Again, the yellow pattern isn't perfect either. But I actually prefer it that way. I spent a lot of time on the flowers themselves, working on making them look mostly dimensional (even as they piled on top of each other in an unrealistic way) - so to have the patterns be looser, less perfect, and painted much more quickly gives some contrast of texture, and makes it clear that this is a handpainted piece.

At this point, I took a break for a couple days. I wasn't sure what else needed to be done with it, so I took a breather.

When I revisited the painting, I added a bit more yellow and orange. I did another layer of yellow/orange over the parts of yellow pattern that cross the black pattern, to help mask that black pattern more. And I also added some orange into some of the petals, to make it a little less "caution" yellow, and add in some subtler yellow-orange transitions.

I'll shows those last few photos in the next post.