Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Get your hands in some paint


Today I thought I'd show off someone else's work - my granddaughter Maxine's watercolor painting. Now that she's 2 years old and old enough to sit at my drawing table I put together a tool box of art supplies for her. When she comes over for a visit one of the first things she does is grab my hand, pull me toward my studio and say "Painting Grandma?" So of course that's what we do. 

Max loves water and really loves dipping her brushes in it and sloshing around. That's how she usually paints - with brushes. This time she decided there's a better way to work with watercolors. This particular set of pan paints has glitter in it (unfortunately, hard to see in the photo). I don't know if that's why it seems to be softer than other kids watercolors but Maxine thought it was great fun to scoop it out of the pans with her fingers and smear it around on the paper. Every once in a while I'd give the paper a mist with my sprayer just to keep things moist and moving around. She loved to feel the spray too, she kept sticking her hands in it.

There's nothing like watching the creativity of children when they get their hands on some paint and I think she has as much to teach me as I have to teach her.

Thursday, September 6, 2012

A dress burning

18 Years
48x36
acrylic on canvas

I took a little break from painting landscapes to go back to the Silent Voices series. This is the latest piece. So far I have 10 of these canvases done and one collage/acrylic piece on watercolor paper. Working on this image was a challenge. I used my granddaughter's dress for my reference and I burned through several  birthday candles in order to get the image down of the flame and wick. When I started I wasn't happy with the look of the dress burning so I mentioned to my son that it would be great if I could actually burn the dress and take photos. Well of course he thought that was an awesome idea - FIRE! Let's go! Lucky for me, my son and daughter-in-law didn't have a particular attachment to the dress that their daughter had outgrown so I was free to burn away.

 

The trick was getting shots without destroying the whole thing. I still needed it to paint from so I had to preserve most of it and hang it back up in the studio.


It took a minute for the flame to take but once it did it went up fast. As you can see, we got the fire stomped out before the dress was gone. So now it's on to another canvas. I don't have the next painting for this series worked out in my head yet so I may work on a landscape next.