It's Spring!

A walk outside here in balmy southwestern Ohio may beg to differ with my post's title -- and it's supposed to "snow shower" on Tuesday -- but, oh well .... IT'S SPRING! (If I say it often enough, it will happen.)

With spring in the air, it's time for sunshine and robins and all those good signs of the season.

It's Spring (Acrylic painting)

The painting to the right -- It's Spring -- is something in the area of design and color I like to explore. Every color used in the painting is solo, no mixing of colors. I did that on purpose.
 
Whenever i look at my paintings and the photo I have taken, I wonder if they could possibly be the same thing. 

The sky is actually quite blue -- Brilliant Blue, in fact, according to the tube of Liquitex acrylic paint. The ground is green, but it is straight! Somehow it looks like it's an upward slant from left-to-right, but -- really -- it's straight. All the outlines were done with a black acrylic paint marker pen.

There's a good chance you will see the same painting again when the seasons change. 


And while on the topic of change ... another spring painting I've been working for about the last 6-7 weeks is below entitled Flowers for Katie.  The daffodils with a blue rose in a vase are left outside the door for Katie to find.

Flowers For Katie (Water-Soluble Oil)

 When I first started the painting I had drawn the lines for the front door and the side panel window. The vase was going to be red and the back wall a bluish-gray. As I have progressed, however, the colors started to change.


The back wall changed to a yellowish-tan, the vase to purple. Part of the reasoning was to emphasize the light source and the shadowing. There's a step in this painting
that's not shown here where the shadows were originally painted on the wall. 

The cast shadows against the blue wall were dark and subsequently lost when the door was painted. Hence the background color was changed.

The vase color changed to balance with the door. If you remember my previous blog discussing composition, another element of composition that I neglected to include is color. You can use color to balance your painting as well and this painting is a great example of what I mean by that.

This is another painting I've done recently using water-soluble oil paints. The jury is still out on how much I like them. The blending is much better than acrylic paint. That was the main reason I wanted to try them. The cleanup afterward is much easier. You actually wipe your brushes off between colors in water, not turpentine or odorless turpentine (Gamsol is the product I prefer). There's a big difference in the brands of water-soluble oils that I have noticed. I much prefer DuoAqua brand. Much creamier and easier to blend.

There's still much work to be done on Flowers for Katie, but I thought it would be good to post a WIP (Work in Progress).

I have been working in oil paints as well and I have a couple landscape paintings that I will post here in the next month or so as soon as they are finished or close to being finished.

A look at the Artists Lounge

My Wall at the Artists Lounge

The photo to the left shows my wall at the Artists Lounge located in the Pop Revolution Gallery in Mason.

We had quite a nice turnout for the first Second Thursday Open House on March 13. Probably close to 100 people visited to see the artwork rendered by the close to 20 artists who are part of the co-op.

The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday every week, and the Artists Lounge Open House is every Second Thursday of the month from 6-9 p.m.


United Art art close-out

For those artists who live in Greater Cincinnati, the United Art and Education store in Sharonville is closing out much of its art supplies. Once the supplies -- from mat boards to brushes to paints and pastel sticks -- are gone, they're gone. The prices have been slashed dramatically -- as much as 40% or more for most items.  The store itself isn't closing. It's re-aligning itself more to the education side than the art side, which us artists find very disheartening since art supply prices there were very economical. Not all the art supplies will be eliminated. I believe the colored pencils will still be offered, though the sets of Prismacolor and Derwent pencils have been slashed by 50% or more.