Category: Paintings

Art, Collage, Drawings, Journals, Paintings

Red and Bosc Pears

Shelly

Red Pear
Red Pear (detail)

I’ve already uploaded details of the top two spreads, but I thought I may as well scan the full pages, too. The top entry was done before the Prismacolor drawing I did this morning. I forgot to put an interleaving sheet of paper between the pages, so the crayon and pencil transferred to the opposite pages. Oops. I also stamped the wrong date on that page. Numbers are hard, m’kay?

Red Pear
Red Pear (detail)

The second was done with watercolor pencils and a Niji water brush. I really like the way these brushes work, and will have to purchase a flat and a larger round when I get a chance. The little round I have is great, but not the right tool for all jobs.

Bosc Pear
Bosc Pear (detail)

The bottom one is acrylic applied with a Q-tip. One of these days, I’m going to have to actually buy some watercolor and acrylic brushes, but in the meantime, this worked pretty well. The smudgy effect suits Bosc pears, I think, because they’ve got a muted, matte finish.

This was a seriously limited palette: raw umber, burnt sienna, yellow ochre, and a touch of titanium white.

Art, Paintings

Little Boat

Shelly

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Little Boat
acrylic on canvas with collage, buttons, beads, and cotton thread
24 x 24 inches

This is yet another bad photo of the (I think) finished painting. I’ll try to remember to get a better shot of it this weekend, when the light will hopefully be better. I ended up using flash, which does very unkind things to artwork. Well, flash is just unkind in general. It also doesn’t help that I had to take the photo from an angle, to avoid the worst of the flash glare. I unskewed everything in Photoshop, but that’s not a very good solution. Much better to try to take a square(ish) photo from the start!

And, now, I’m going to get off the computer and try to warm up.

Art, Paintings

Untitled Boat

Shelly

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As yet untitled boat (in progress)
acrylic on canvas with collage, buttons, beads, and cotton thread
24 x 24 inches

This is an awful photo, but it was the best I could do with metallic paint after dark. I’m not anywhere near done yet, and haven’t decided exactly how I’m going to handle the sky. If we get the disgusting wintry mix that’s been threatened, I should have plenty of time tomorrow to finish it. Otherwise, it’s probably going to have to wait until the weekend.

One thing I didn’t account for, when I decided to add beads and buttons, was having to sew along the stretcher bars. NOT EASY! The canvas had adhered to the stretcher bar, which is normal, but pulling the two apart caused the canvas to stretch. It should shrink back into shape quickly, and if it doesn’t, spritzing the back with water will do the trick. Still, NOT EASY to sew between a stretched canvas and the stretcher bars. Just sayin’…

Art, Paintings, Photography

Reduce Reuse Recycle

Shelly

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I pick up stretchers at yard sales and thrift stores. You can get them cheap that way. I got four of these 24 x 24 inch stretchers years ago at a garage sale. They were covered with some godawful 70s gold-and-orange-on-brown patterned fabric. O ick. I pulled the old fabric off and stretched canvas over them. The other three are sporting paintings that I’ll probably keep, but the fourth was never finished. The underpainting on the old canvas was done about 10 years ago, and it’s not something I’m likely to ever want to finish, so I decided it was time to pull it off, restretch the canvas, and start over from scratch.

The stretcher is old, but it’s still nice and sturdy. The crack along one bar is only superficial. I’ll need to tighten up one of the corners, but other than that, it’s perfectly usable. I love the look of the old nail heads and the way the paint seeped around and through the back side of the canvas. No, that’s not a good thing. It’ll eat the canvas where it wasn’t primed. The seeping is a by-product of using heavily thinned, drippy paint. It goes where it wants, and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it. I primed the canvas along the edges, but that didn’t keep the paint from being wicked around to the back, where the canvas was left raw.

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