Paint Lab - Working in a Series

Decided to approach my next piece of work from a different starting point. Inspired by Lab No. 27 from the great little book "Paint Lab" by Deborah Forman, I tore a large sheet of Saunders Waterford watercolour paper into six roughly equal pieces and, inspired by a photo of Paul and the kids leaning off a jetty in the Florida Keys, gave myself 30 minutes to quickly work in acrylic to block in some compositions and colour schemes, using a limited palette of three or four colours.

 

Here's what I ended up with.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Over the next couple weeks I have been working on two or three of these further to develop them into small paintings. After a little while the third one above progressed to this stage:

After some more detailed work on the figure I ended up with this little picture:

   
In parallel I was also working on image 1 from the initial six studies. I first glazed the whole thing with a layer of  mid tone grey-blue through which I hoped the brighter colours would glow through in places. I then worked from dark to light to develop a three figure composition:

  After a bit more painstaking (!) work on the figures I felt the picture had reached resolution:

 
Looking back at the initial sketches it still always amazes me how these images evolve out of the paper and paint. It feels a bit like magic. I'm guessing other artists probably also get this feeling sometimes (on good days anyway!).  


Postscript
Initial sketch no.4 has a lovely velvety glowing colour in real life and rather than painting over it I'm planning on doing a white ink sketch of pelicans on top of it. Sketch 6 also evolved a bit further but did not entice me to finish itself (as yet). Maybe one day...
 

Great Blue Heron painting

Been struggling with this little painting of a great blue heron in the Florida everglades. Been through a few different stages.

STAGE 1

I started with the water using acrylic paint and turquoise blue acrylic ink sprayed with water to create runs. I then painted in the bird. Felt it needed something more at this point so I kept going. Splashed on some prussian blue wash around the bird to deepen the contrasts. 

Spattered in some bright green highlights to the water (using toothbrush and whipping a small headed brush through the air), then added some more highlights and detail to the body and head of the bird - trying to get the shape more right - and finally added some suggestions of waterside foliage to put the bird in a little more context. 

 

At this point, although I had planned to add some larger leaves to the foreground I decided to leave them out for the time being. Left the painting for a couple of days. Went back into studio and thought - actually it might be finished... But then the next day decided it did need something more in foreground, but not leaves. Going back to the original photographic source material I decided to add some sticky stalks to the left of the bird, to give more of the feeling of the bird wading through the grassy Everglades.  

The finished piece. I really loved seeing these birds up close in the wild, and hope that this painting does this lovely feathery guy justice.  The final painting is  29 x 39.5cm  and is destined for the Paperwork 2 show I am taking part in, in August (part of Edinburgh Fringe 2015).

Performance Costume Design at ECA Degree Show

Went to Edinburgh College of Art Degree Show yesterday. Some interesting stuff but as always my favourite section was the theatre costume design (even though I'm a painter!)

 

 

 

This Grasshopper outfit looked really great close up. My photo doesn't do it justice. Big sticky out tail at the back!

                                         (The hanging black thing is a swimming fish!)

 

 

All very creative and inspiring. Especially since I'm useless with a sewing machine...