New Acrylic Painting in Progress

Awhile ago I bought a pack of seven 12"x12" stretched canvas from Michaels while they were having a sale. Then, I remembered that I had several 12"x12" designs already created on my computer from a few years ago - compositions that combined patterns and flowers in Adobe Photoshop.

I made these designs to work as digital scrapbook paper; I had thoughts of printing my own 12"x12" scrapbook paper to sell, and in 2014 specifically bought a large format printer that could print up to that size. Unfortunately, the printer had a lot of issues, including NOT being able to print the size I wanted, or print on any of the cardstock types I wanted to print on, and I ended up returning it to the store and investing in a different type of printer instead.

But I still have several 12"x12" digital designs that I'd already created with scrapbooking in mind, and they're just sitting on my computer waiting to be used somewhere. I looked through them, selected my favorite seven (or the seven that I thought would best translate to acrylic) and am now trying to "recreate" these digital collages as a square acrylic painting on canvas.

Each painting will have a different "main" color. This first one is yellow, and the subject matter is black eyed susans. In fact, I think most of the black eyed susan imagery I used in the digital collage came from the same black eyed susan photo that I used for This Busted World in my recent Cloud Atlas Sextet Series - but I feel okay about "reusing" this source material again, because the general color scheme, composition, and painting style are very different between the two works.

Here is This Busted World:

"This Busted World" - 8"x10" Acrylic on Paper

And here is the new painting I am working on:

On the left, you can see the printout of the composition. The background is yellow, with some blurry black stripes. Black eyed susans float around and through the background in different transparent or opaque layers. And yellow and black lines of pattern work their way over and under the flowers, integrating into the petals.

I did not want to trace the exact design onto the canvas to create this painting, as I did for This Busted World and the others in that series. I wanted to use more variations in tone rather than just picking four colors, and I wanted a generally looser style. So to start, I only drew a faint sketch onto the canvas of where the main flowers would be placed. Then, I just dived in and started painting.

First, I added color to the background:

Then, I made sure to mark the dark centers of the flowers so that I could keep track of them as I added more and more layers.

I added some orange shadows:

And some green ones:

And then I started filling in the petals:

This is basically the "first layer" of the piece. Now that I have (most of) the canvas covered in paint, I can go back in and add dimension and depth, flower by flower. I try to work on it a couple hours a week (squeezing this "side project" in between working on editing my novel and planning for a large colored pencil drawing I'll be starting soon), and hope to be finished with it by the end of August.

It is still keeping its "loose" style so far, but I don't know how long that will last. I tend to "overwork" things - or maybe I just prefer things to look exact, detailed, intentional, and clean, because that's how my paintings usually end up. We'll see how this one goes!

Oh - and it's name is Find a Proverbial Mountain. I wanted to make sure to give them all titles early this time, so that I can make the paintings go with the titles as I work; rather than deciding on a title at the end.

I've gotten several likes on the pics I've posted on Instagram of this painting so far:

In this last pic, you can see how I've started to add some dimensionality into the top right flower and the background around it, giving it a more 3D look.

Lots of work still to do, but it's starting to get there!

Composition Designs for New Acrylic Paintings

I haven't played around with acrylic since... probably freshman/sophomore year of college, when I took a 2D Design class and we had some assignments with acrylic. I do love it - it's more intuitive than watercolor, I think, and therefore easier, in my opinion - but I got so sidetracked with watercolor and colored pencil projects for awhile that I forgot how much fun I had with it back in my 2D Design course.

I wanted to experiment with acrylic again.

I feel like with acrylic it's really easy to go big and sloppy - really dab the paint on and make things thick and abstract and colorful. And I do have some canvases (of moderate sizes, not large ones) that would lend themselves well to that style. But before I went too far in that direction, I wanted to do some smaller, tighter paintings first - because I knew if I let myself go big and sloppy I would 1) make a huge mess, 2) probably waste a bunch of expensive supplies (paint, canvas) just screwing around, and 3) maybe not end up with anything worth selling. There is something to said about doing art just for the experiments and the process, to be sure. But I wanted more 8"x10" size artwork to stock my Etsy shop with, and decided this wasn't the time for directionless experiments.

So I planned. I searched through all the floral photographs I'd taken over the years and found 6 I really liked that I could use to make a series of six paintings. Then, I manipulated them (a lot) in Photoshop. I played up the contrast using the "Curves" feature to pick my new highlight and shadow, and then I discarded the color content and made the photos grayscale. Then, I used the "paper cutout" filter to turn my grayscale images into images with only three colors - a highlight, shadow, and midtone.

This photo is of black-eyed susans in the gardens lining the Detroit Riverwalk:

These coneflowers were part of a garden at a rest stop in Illinois, which my friends and I stopped at on a road trip from Michigan to L.A. (and back) in 2012:

These tall, exotic plants (which look to me like they'd be related to the foxglove family) were in the Parc de la Ciutadella in Barcelona, which I visited in 2010:

These pretty pink impatiens were found at a garden in Rochester, New York, which I visited in 2012:

This phlox plant was somewhere in southern Europe, photographed on either my 2008 study abroad trip or my 2010 vacation. I want to say they were in Florence or Rome (2008):

Finally, I chose a large sunflower that was part of a sunflower bouquet my grandma had on her kitchen table:

I stripped these photos of their color and details because I wanted to add in my own details later. I will not be painting them black and white; I just wanted to have a blank slate to work with so that I could choose my own colors later.

Once I had these base photos, I manipulated them (again) to get them into gray tones - just so they would be easier to print. (I didn't want to waste all that black ink.)

Then, I printed them out. I outlined them with marker so I would have crisp lines to trace onto acrylic paper later. Then, I added some pattern to it.

I could have added pattern on my computer - I made the patterns with Adobe software, after all, so they are all stored digitally. But as much as I love the Adobe package and what it can do, there always comes a point for me where I'd rather start working with my hands, on actual paper.

My generation is probably the last generation that will ever feel this way - that sometimes doing things by hand is faster than doing it by computer. Reminding myself how to get the pattern onto just the colors I wanted in Photoshop would've taken me longer than to just trace the patterns by hand; it also would've been more frustrating and less fun for me. But there was also another reason I wanted to trace the patterns by hand - because I wanted to have that muscle memory. I write notes by hand too - I write out my to-do lists and keep a paper calendar because I know that writing things by hand helps me remember them. I always took notes with a pen and notebook in school - even when others around me chose to take notes on their laptops. Actually, I found that in my art courses, laptop-users were in the minority. Even for art history courses, where a lot of lecture notes had to be jotted down. Maybe it's an artist thing then, to prefer taking notes, writing, or drawing by hand.

In any case, I flipped through my big Binder of Patterns, where I have printed out and alphabetized many (but not all) of my pattern designs onto standard printer paper. I chose six patterns I liked, and then traced those patterns into only the darkest part of my compositions - the shadows of the image.

I added the patterns by holding up the pattern printout and the gray composition printout against a window and tracing.

Here are the photos of that process:

The six print-outs spread out in a 2x3 grid. I've added the pattern to only the bottom left image so far - the photograph of the phlox plant. On the left side you can also see the print-out of how I thought I might color the images using a yellow-blue-violet color palette.

A close up of the phlox image with pattern "Victoria" added, and the pattern sheet I used next to it.

The coneflower image got some pattern "Velvet" added to its background.

The foxglove image got some pattern "Tamika" in the background.

The black-eyed susans got pattern "Melissa"

The impatiens got pattern "Orchestrina"

And the sunflower image got pattern "Magnolia"

I chose these patterns because I had used them before in earlier paintings and knew they would look nice with these organic, slightly-abstracted floral compositions. I didn't want to try out a new pattern (though I have plenty to choose from!) simply because I was preparing to use a medium (acrylic) which I had not used in a long time.

Here are some close-ups of two of the designs, so you can see how detailed they are. Keep in mind that these are only 8"x10" in size, so they aren't very big for this much detail work!

So those are the designs I landed on. Tomorrow I will show you how I transferred those designs onto acrylic paper so that I could start painting!