Field of Flowers Day 13

Experimenting was really fun this morning!  I’m calling this Field of Flowers and I don’t think it’s quite done, it needs some more darks, perhaps in the middle, but I want to mull it over.  It’s easy to paint over the cool details that are already there.

I’ve tried this before, a la Jean Haines, last month when I talked about my inability to see pictures in the clouds, and I had trouble seeing exactly how to make something from the abstract shapes.  I’ve learned a bit more from doing it today and that is to make lighter valued changes, softening at least one side of the paint stroke.  So, for me, rather than seeing this 3″ section as “X”, I play with a small portion of it, see what happens and then keep playing.

Here are some in process photos:

yellow and blues, salt, cling wrap, and some additional lifting and playing 

I wet the back and front of the paper and put it on acrylic sheet.  I used new gamboge yellow and three blues: cerulean chromium, cobalt and ultramarine.  focused the colors on blue at the top, yellows in the middle, greens at the bottom and then smooshed and pressed down in various places the cling wrap while it was nice and wet.  Then I played with salt in a few places and lifted and added a bit of paint before letting it all dry.

once dry and cling wrap removed.  see the salt blooms? 

I like the merging of blues and yellow to make the foliage.  The salt blooms are cool.

Here’s a midway shot.  You can see that I’m playing with the idea of buds or seed heads under the left black eyed susan and under the right one, I’ve used pale values to make larger a leaf shaped cluster.

Here’s the black and white version of where it is right now…and looking at it, I can see that more darks are needed, just a touch here and there.

Thanks for stopping by!