In the studio again!

I'm going to fess up to being a copy cat. I'm not ashamed of it. Not in the least. I blame Kim Attwooll. It's her fault for making such an awesome painting, one I've envied for several years now. I've tried for some time to locate more of her work, but I only come up with a few decent links. They are here, here, here and here. I want to give her full credit for being the inspiration for what I'm working on right now.

Honestly, I consider myself fortunate that I'm able to be a copy cat 'cause I get to do this ...

Background is started ...

I hope it will look sort of like this when I'm done ...

It was sparked by this image ...

Now, her original painting appears to be watercolor and I'm working in acrylic. Mine is also lots bigger. 24" x 48" to be exact. It's a 1.5" deep gallery wrapped canvas, too.

I love the colors of Kim's painting. Those vibrant oranges and yellows, the intense reds, the pop of aqua just get me. The image is both delicate and passionately alive with color. Of course, the question is why would I not reproduce it just as it is? Well, it's about home decorating and neon orange not being a color that really 'goes' in the house. "Stick out like a sore thumb" is the phrase that comes to mind, particularly since the painting I'm doing will be hanging in my dining room. Gonna' pretty much be the first thing someone sees when they walk in the back door.

The decorating in the house is about calm, quiet, and zen. Day-glow yellow isn't really all that zen-like. The changes I'm making to the work keeps some of that pop of color - the aqua - but is more water than fire. Softer, muted and relaxed. I'm working with the mental and emotional approach of how it really feels to me to sit beside a pond. I love water. Yes, I'm a fire-bug. Love me some fire! Yet water, and my personal feelings surrounding it, are the theme for home decor.

The outside world is a crazy, frenetic, constantly moving place. I want to live in a space which feels and expresses the total opposite of that external chaos. Maybe it's where I am in my head right now. It's where I've been striving to be for a long time and have let too much of the world leak in. This painting is the beginning of putting the world back outside the door where it belongs.

Namaste', y'all ...

Black and gold, with sparkles!

The husband's studio, like the majority of rooms in a house, has four walls.

One wall has a window, which I made these curtains for ...

One wall has two doors - one closet, one enter/exit, and two blank walls. On the south wall we've taken care of the art issue with the previously blogged about Angel. On the space between the door and closet he has hung my Prophetess painting ...

This left the last wall, the north wall, empty and in need of attention. Lots of debate has gone on about what to put there. My suggestion was a nice table and a big amethyst geode cathedral like this ...

I really like the geode!

I made a few other suggestions, but none met with any enthusiasm on the part of the husband. Then, several months ago, he came up with an idea for a piece of art. Considering the months of struggle with the Angel, I wasn't all that thrilled with the prospect of another special request. His idea: a painting of his music pseudonym, Au. This, for all you non-chemistry heads out there, is from the Chemical Table of Elements for Gold. Okay, I could work with that. Of course, he had to throw a kink in it ... he wanted the letters to be embossed. Argh.

I had to stew on it for awhile. What was the best way, with the tools I had available to me, to create large, gold nugget-like, embossed letters on a canvas?

Light bulb!

I decided to use a 24" x 24", 1.5" deep gallery wrap canvas which I had previously started to use for an abstract painting. I'd gotten as far as spreading some texture medium on it, but then had to put it away in my studio closet while I worked on the Angel. I pulled it out and painted it with two coats of black acrylic.

I took the Au logo from his CD art into QuarkXPress, sized it, then printed it out via the tiling option. I put the pieces on my light table and taped them together, then cut them out. I used Elmer's Glue on the backside of the letters, sort of reverse decoupage', and stuck them onto the canvas. The glue softened the paper so that I was able to mush it down into the peaks and valleys of the texture medium. Let that dry for a day.

Using the tip on the bottle, I ran a bead of glue all around the edges of the lettering, both sealing them to the canvas and creating a space (once the bead dried enough) I could then fill in with more glue. I repeated this process three times to create about a 1/8" deep layer of embossing. Since I wanted it to have a higher level of embossing, as well as both smooth and rough texture ... like a gold nugget ... I added another 1/8" or so layer of texture medium with a small, pointed putty knife. I worked the medium to be rough, but then went back over it in areas with the flat of the putty knife to give it the smoother areas. I also knew the medium, being applied so thickly, would crack as it dried, giving more texture. Had to let all of that dry for about a day with a big fan blowing on it.

It surprises people to find out that I don't have expensive acrylic paints like Winsdor & Newton or Liquitex. What I use is those little, cheap-o bottle of craft acrylics. The kind you'd think to use for painting Tole or that awful One-Stroke stuff. They come in a huge variety of colors, which I think is marvelous! Yeah, they are liquidy, unlike the way tube acrylics are heavy-bodied and squirt out like oil paints or toothpaste. I'd love to have some of those thick acrylics but I just can't afford them. So I do what I gotta' do, ya' know? The liquid acrylics work for me because I paint them like watercolors, just using glazing medium instead of water.

I pulled out a few of the gold paints I had and decided on Antique Gold because it looks more like 10K gold, what mine and the husband's wedding bands are made of. I'm not fond of bright gold, like the 24K stuff. It doesn't look "real" to me. Yes, I know that sounds strange. It took two coats of the antique gold to cover the embossing. I had to pay attention and make sure I got it in all the nooks and crannies. Any place I 'slipped' had to be touched up with black paint.

Once the paint was dry, I used a gold glitter paint, with a extra-fine cut glitter, on some of the rough areas of the embossing. I left some places with just one coat and other places I used two or three coats to get the right amount of sparkle. Next, I grabbed the Elmer's again and put dabs of glue in some of the deepest cracks and ridges, then sprinkled on some large cut glitter. Messy, but I wanted small touches of 'rough sparkle' on the lettering so that it would better catch the light better when you walked past it. The final step was to use the fine cut glitter paint on a few places on the texturing of the black background. Just to highlight it a bit and keep it from being too stark and bland.

This is the end result ...

Now I have to put wire on the back and hang it up!

Namaste', y'all ...

Nineteen Months In The Making.

It's been so long that I've worked on this particular project it almost seems strange to say, at long last, it's over. Finished. Stick a fork in me and call me done. Way done. Ready to turn my back and run, not walk, in the opposite direction.

In June of 2009 I started working on this angel for the husband's studio. The green background is the color we painted his walls. He wanted it for the wall behind his keyboard desk, done so it appears to be coming out of the wall and looking down at him as he's sitting in his chair. The original idea was to paint it as trompe l'oeil on canvas, then attach the canvas to the wall in such a way that it blended in smoothly. Great in theory, not so great in practical application.

This thing is big. The angel measures 6'9" from wing tip to wing tip, 3'10" from top of head to bottom fade of gown. Big. The only place we had large enough to hold the canvas was the dining room wall ... and there this canvas has stayed, thumb tacked up and in constant view, for the past nineteen months. I can't begin to express just how sick and tired I am of looking at it. I think the word 'loathsome' comes reasonable close.

This finished image is done entirely in graphite, with white conte' pencil for the highlights. It didn't start out that way. Actually, is started with black acrylic paint and glazing medium with a completely different angel pieced together in Photoshop from several images I found on the internet. Spent months on that and was frustrated beyond belief. The image was all wrong, had to correct for proper shadowing/highlights, completely change the hair and gown, etc, etc, etc. It was a mess from the get-go.

Then the husband said it might look cool if it had color ... like she was a statue and then 'coming to life' as she was emerging from the wall. I painted over and started again, trying to incorporate color. Months, months, months. Mess, mess, mess. By now, I was ready to rip it from the wall and set fire to it. Believe me, I gave that serious consideration.

From the beginning, I knew the reference material I was trying to work from was woefully inadequate, to put it mildly. But I thought I could make it work. I was so wrong. At my breaking point on the second attempt I told the husband he was going to have to help me take real photos of me, dressed up, with correct lighting, etc. and I was going to start over with that. Ugh! Whole 'nuther kettle of fish trying to get him to take the photos that fit the image I had in my head! Three attempts and about eleventy dozen photos later we got some I could work with ... after more of that Photoshop tinkering stuff.

I pulled out my enlarger and traced it off for the third time. By now I had decided I was NOT going to attempt it again with paint. I wanted a 'part of the wall' feel to it and knew I had to use the background green color as my neutral tone. That left black for shadowing and white for highlights. I'm not experienced enough with charcoal to go there, so all that was left me was graphite. Daunting to consider creating basically a pencil drawing 4' x 7'. Kind of like vacuuming a football field with a Dust Buster.

Thing is, I knew I could do it, knew it would take a lot of time, and knew I was also really hanging on by a thread at even having any desire whatsoever to begin again. I was never really thrilled about doing this project to start with, but the husband had asked for it. So, I started on this third version, I think, sometime in May or June of 2010. It was around this time the husband decided he didn't want it attached to the wall after all - just in case we ever had to move he would like to take it with him. Of course, this means the canvas will now have to be stretched and gallery-wrapped onto stretcher bars like a regular painting. With the gallery wrap, we won't have to use a frame, just hang it.

When I started, I had made myself a promise that I wouldn't paint anything else until this was finished. Of course, I had no idea I'd just chained myself to the dinning room wall for the next nineteen months or I would never, ever have made that promise. No siree. Nuh-uh. Nope. No way. It's been torture. I've had a bazillion ideas for paintings going through my head and haven't been able to do a damn thing about it. Well, you can bet your sweet pa-toot this ol' gal is gonna' to be making up for lost time. I'm going to be buried in my studio for ever. Watercolors, here I come!!! Acrylics on small canvases! Woo Hoo! Crafts and sewing and all kinds of fun and adventure will be happening in my little corner of the world.

As for the angel, I'm going to get some graphite spray fixative, spray that ol' witch a good coat or two, take her off the wall, roll her up, and lay it in the floor in the husband's studio. He gets the chore of taking it to the framer to get it stretched, and he get the chore of getting it up on his studio wall. And, I'm even thinking I'll let him finish painting the green on the canvas after it's wrapped. 'Cause, ya' know, I'm done.

Namaste', y'all ...