Leaf Paintings - Post 2

Yesterday I started describing the process for creating my fall leaf paintings, and today I have a lot more photos to show you.

(The finished products - 2 8"x10" paintings and 2 4"x6" paintings can be found on sale here.)

As I showed yesterday, I put some masking down on the paper to preserve some areas before I painted over with any pigments. After all of the paint for that first red-orange-yellow layer was dry, I peeled the masking fluid off.

Because I was working on four paintings at once, some paintings were still getting their "first round" of stamping done while I peeled off the masking fluid and moved on with those that were ready.

Once the masking fluid was all removed, I was ready to stamp some more. This time I added in green for a focal point to stand out against the red-orange-yellow background. I also used a greater variety of leaf sizes and shapes, and tried to leave the leaves on longer, so they would be darker and crisper, with visible outlines, leaf stems, and veins.

To help secure the leaves in place while the pigment was transferring, I put things on top of the leaves, like boxes of playing cards and the bottle of masking fluid (whatever I had handy at the table I was working at).

Here you can see some of the darker orange and yellow leaves, after they'd been sitting for some time.

I also found that wetting the leaves on the opposite side (pushing on the opposite side with my watercolor brush) helped to push the pigment off the leaves and onto the paper.

The first two that got to this second stage of leaf stamping were okay - but not exactly what I was hoping for. You can see in the close-ups that the green leaves were actually left on the paper too long, giving them kind of a weird quality I didn't like. These were the two paintings that I eventually scraped or cut into smaller pieces for the 4"x6" paintings.

The last two paintings turned out better (I learned from my mistakes). Here are some close-ups of the last two paintings.

After all of them had been stamped with all four colors (red, orange, yellow, and green) and I was satisfied with the amount of paper covered in pigment vs. the amount of white paper still visible, I left them to dry overnight.

The next day, I went back through with colored pencil to emphasize some of the leaf shapes - but those photos are the story for tomorrow!

If you are interesting in purchasing these paintings, check out my Etsy shop here!

Leaf Paintings - Post 1

If you follow me on Instagram, or frequently check my Etsy page, you may have seen some pictures of 4 leaf stamp paintings I created this fall - 2 8"x10" paintings and 2 smaller ones. (You can find these on sale here.)

I took a lot of pictures of the process I used to create this paintings, and today I'll show you the first few steps.

First, I collected leaves from my Michigan backyard. I tried to find whole leaves that were not too dried or too curly yet, and I kept them moist and flat (by pressing them in a book with other slightly damp leaves) until I was ready to use them.

I also prepared 4 pieces of watercolor paper by marking with pencil the boundaries for an 8"x10" size. (I was hoping to get 4 8"x10"s out of this, but in the end didn't like how two of the paintings ended up.)

Then I collected my other materials - watercolor pigments, my watercolor palette, a brush, a water cup, and a bottle of masking fluid (with a shitty brush I didn't care about to use with that). The masking fluid was a couple years old and mostly congealed inside the bottle (boo!) but I tried to use it anyway, and had moderate success.

I painted a couple leaves with the masking fluid and used these leaves to "stamp" the fluid onto the paper. Because it was half congealed, a lot of it stayed on the leaf and didn't transfer.

In the photos below, you can see the masking fluid on the watercolor paper. It preserves the paper so you can paint on top of it, and I was hoping some of the leaf shapes and textures (like the leaf veins) would come out, but because the fluid was old they were more or less just blobs. I mean, they still looked okay in the background - they were just more abstract that I initially intended.

Once the masking fluid was dry, I added some red and orange to the paper as background color. I tried just flinging dots of water onto the paper, but then I got impatient and just put down whole swaths of color.

Here are some close-ups of this first red-orange wash layer, while the paint is still drying. You can see it resting on top of the masking fluid leaf blobs, where the fluid is protecting it from adhering to the page.

Then I started stamping! Holding down the leave only briefly (like you if it were a real stamp), puts down pigment but doesn't hold it in a leaf shape. To get a leaf shape, you have to press the leaf down hard, and let it sit on the paper for a few minutes so the pigment starts to dry.

In this photo, you can see the first round of red, orange, and yellow pigment stamped while I moved the leaves over to a second piece of paper to keep going.

Below are some close-ups of successful stamps, where you can actually see some of the leaf stems and veins transferred onto the paper.

I went through and did this with the red, orange, and yellow pigments for a few "rounds," moving the leaves from paper to paper and working on all four simultaneously.

Sometimes I left the leaves on the page for several hours, to get a darker/crisper leaf transfer. Once all four papers were well covered with red, orange, and yellow pigment, I let them dry.

Tomorrow I will show more pictures of how I did the rest of this process, so make sure to check back!

If you are interesting in purchasing these paintings, check out my Etsy shop here!

Stamped Leaves

I recently rediscovered this painting in a portfolio of old artwork from high school. I remember really liking the process - that was the first year I was really getting into watercolor, so I was excited to experiment with it. Given the current season, I thought I'd feature some detail images of this fun painting today -

And, if I get around to it, I hope to make some smaller (5"x7") paintings using the same technique sometime in the next month or two before winter settles in and I don't have the necessary leaves at my disposal outside.

"Stamped Leaves" by Andrea Arbit - 11"x15" Watercolor & Colored Pencil on Paper

This painting is available for purchase on Etsy!

Includes 16"x20" green mat!

To create this painting, I followed several steps. It was AP Art my senior year of high school, there were only about 10 of us in the class, and we were often just kind of left to do our own thing, in whatever media we wanted to use, but occasionally our teacher would give us a class-wide assignment when we thought we needed to have our horizons widened, or help getting out of a rut. This was one such assignment.

Step one was to collect leaves. Dry leaves, fresh leaves plucked from a tree, whatever we could find. All different sizes and from a variety of trees. We didn't have any deciduous trees in our yard, so I had to walk to the subdivision park with a Ziploc to gather my collection. Here in Rochester Hills, though, I have a plethora of leaves to choose from, right in my own backyard.

Step two was to paint a few leaves with masking fluid, and apply the fluid to the watercolor paper by "stamping" the leaves.

This is what masking fluid looks like

And here is a great resource for how to use it in watercolor painting

This preserved some white areas of the paper while I stamped other leaves on top of it, to give it a mutli-layered texture.

Step three was to use watercolor pigment on other leaves (NOT using the same leaves I used with masking fluid, as those were, of course, now trash) and layer on the color. I used a cool color palette of yellow, blue, green, and brown. Blue can't be found in nature, but I wasn't really going for realistic.

If I'm remembering correctly (and it was a decade ago that I created this painting, so it's possible I'm not), I used a few different methods, including:

1) Making a "puddle" of very watery pigment on my palette, dipping the leaf in, and transferring the leaf onto the paper. If I held the leaf-stamp down for a short amount of time, the result was a fuzzy vaguely-leaf shaped blob of color. If I held it down for longer, it would produce a crisper image.

2) Stamping the leaf "wet-on-wet" (fresh paint onto an area that was already painted, or an area of the paper I'd thoroughly watered with my brush) - which would also achieve those fuzzier shapes - and stamping the leaf "wet-on-dry" (fresh paint onto an area of dry paper) to get a clearer image.

3) Painting the leaf so that I could really get the leaf to soak up more pigment and produce a darker image, and then stamping it. I believe using this technique and holding the leaf-stamp for several minutes is what achieved the topmost layer, with its clearly visible leaf veins.

When I make my smaller versions in the coming months, I'll have to experiment again and see what methods work best to achieve the results I'm looking for, but the general guidelines above are a good place to start.

Once the layers were all dry, step four was to remove the masking fluid to exposed the preserved white paper underneath.

For the final step, I went through with a blue colored pencil and traced some of the edges of the leaf shapes (and drew my own "leaf veins" in some places) to add visual variety and define some of the shapes better.

My art teacher had a mat in this light olive green color that he cut for me to use. He thought it'd bring out the yellow-brown tones of the painting nicely.

Don't forget - this painting is available for purchase on Etsy!

Vanessa Diffenbaugh's "The Language of Flowers" & Work In Progress

As I got into yesterday, I love to read - and I read a lot.

One book that has meant a lot to me in the last few years is Vanessa Diffenbaugh's The Language of Flowers. You might understand why if you've been reading along when I was talking about my honors thesis for several tedious blog entries. I heard about this book whose primary trope was using flowers as a means of conveying messages and I just had to read it. I had already completed my thesis by this point (it was published in 2011 and I graduated EMU in 2010), but I was still making floral watercolor paintings. I wanted to find out what other feelings or symbolism I could convey with flowers besides focusing on women's sexuality all the time.

Well, of course the book isn't really about the Victorian symbolism of flowers. There's a lot more to it than that. It's about a beautiful, strong young woman named Victoria who doesn't understand how beautiful and strong she is because the world has worn her down. Freshly emancipated from the foster care system, she has known more grief than love. What's worse, she thinks this is what she deserves.

One of my favorite books of all time.

I connected with Victoria in such a personal way. I was not unloved as a child, I didn't go through the system - in fact, as I said in my last entry, I lived a pretty sheltered life and experienced trauma only secondhand, through fiction stories I discovered at my local library. But somehow I still manage to beat up on myself, still manage to convince myself that I am not enough, not worthy of human needs like companionship or love or happiness. I think I only have myself to blame, that I'm the only one keeping me back from realizing my potential. I don't have a troubled past like Victoria to fall back on, to explain why I so willingly self-sabotage my own happiness - which makes me feel even worse, frankly. Because that means it really is all up to me, all my own fault, my own learned helplessness, something that I taught myself with little or no prodding from outside forces.

Regardless of where we come from - privilege or oppression, security or a series of childhood traumas - we're all still capable of low self-esteem, of self-loathing, of depression, or any other kind of mental illness. We all have days when we're going to get down on ourselves - some of us more than others. It's going to happen. We have to learn strategies to shake it off. We have to not believe ourselves when we say things like "I am not enough." Because that's bullshit. What does that even mean? We're all enough. We're all more than enough. The only standards for humanity are the ones we impose upon ourselves. We can choose not to listen to them. Well, we can try not to listen, anyway.

That's the feeling this book gave me. In my Goodreads review (written in 2013) I wrote:

"Since my thesis in 2010 I have done very little painting. The few I have done were still of flowers, but only superficially. I steered clear from attempts to invoke any sort of significance, pairing them with frivolous, feminine patterns to encourage reading them only as objects of pure decoration.

"Two unfinished watercolors, both dahlias (which, according to Vanessa Diffenbaugh's helpful flower dictionary at the end of this book, signify "dignity"), have sat untouched in my studio for months. The first layers are frozen, looking better than I'd hoped when I started them, simultaneously surprising me and making me wary to pick up my brush and continue (for what if future layers ruined what little I'd successfully done?).

"Watercolor, such a large part of my life only three years ago, had all but dwindled completely away. I didn't necessarily mind - directionless in my career, I didn't know how or how much or even if painting was meant to fit into my life long-term - but family continued to ask what paintings I was working on, implicit concern behind their questions. If I wasn't painting, why not? And was this perhaps a symptom of another, larger problem?

"This book did more than make me weep. For the first time in a long time, I wanted so badly to finish my dahlia watercolors and start a hundred new ones that I seriously considered running downstairs at 3 am to do so. Instead, I pulled my notebook off my nightstand and wrote down this feeling, so it will be available for reference in the future. My watercolors will still be waiting for me tomorrow. And the next day. And the next. But these words have to be captured tonight:

"Just like Victoria, I am worthwhile. I am loved. It's okay to make mistakes. I shouldn't be afraid to paint."

(You can read my full Goodreads review of The Language of Flowers here.)

So, you may be wondering if, in the two years since reading that book and writing that review, I ever got around to finishing my Dahlia painting.

"When Fear Gets in the Way" by Andrea Arbit - 15"x11" Watercolor on Paper

Remember this painting? (I posted this picture in the first entry of this blog.) Yeah, I didn't finish it. I had already unstapled it from my gatorboard, which means that it wasn't stretched out anymore, so any subsequent layers I added would make the paper wrinkled. I mean, there are ways to unwrinkle paper. A regular clothes iron, for instance, which is what I usually use.

But there were also a few spots on this painting and the other one I'd been working on (which was actually a painting of tulips, not dahlias - I'd remembered it wrong when I'd written that review) where I had used masking fluid. And apparently masking fluid (which is a goopy white or yellow liquid you brush onto the places where you want to preserve white, and which you then rub off once you're finished painting, to re-expose the white paper underneath) has an expiration date. It's meant to be temporary. It's not meant to stay on watercolor paper for months at a time. It looks worse on the tulips - the masking fluid didn't come off at all, and is permanently stuck to the paper.

I mean, I don't have to finish the painting. In fact, as the artist, I get to decide when it is finished. So I decided it was done and moved on.

But the point is not that I "gave up" on this painting. It's that I moved on. I didn't give up on all painting.

And to help me not be "afraid to paint" I am trying to show my paintings on this blog - and on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest - even when they are still in progress. A lot of times I don't want to show something until it's already done, so that I know it'll turn out okay and be worth showing off. But I am allowed to make mistakes, I am allowed to show my works in progress if I want to. I don't have to be afraid, to think that something has to be perfect to put it on display. (If I had to wait until I felt amazing about myself to leave the house, I'd leave the house a lot less frequently than I already do.)

So in that vein, here is my latest "in progress" -

Two watercolor paintings, in progress - as shown on my Instagram @afrownfe (Andrea Arbit)

I started these a long time ago. I made the compositions on my computer for two similar rose paintings. I traced the compositions onto watercolor paper. I put down a wash of green. I started putting down the dark brownish-purple layers. And then I stopped, and set them aside, and worked on other things for awhile.

I took them out again the other day. I didn't staple them to gatorboard, so they're wrinkled anyway. I also made sure not to use any masking fluid, because I knew I wouldn't finish them in time to take the fluid off (and I was right). If it takes me ten more years to finish, so be it - I'll take them out every once and awhile and do a few more layers. I don't have an excuse this time for being unable to put more effort into it at a later date.

But really the goal is for it not to take that long. In college, for my watercolor classes, I made a full sheet size watercolor painting every 3 weeks or so. These two are half-sheet size each. It shouldn't take me long if I actually sit down and do them and put in the work. I need to get in the habit of setting aside time for art every day. It's the only way this shit gets done.