If I had to show what my actual "style" is, this painting is a good example. Boring, daily life illustrations. Nothing extraordinary. My main career as a successful artist was as a collage artist, and #surrealism was the name of the game. 10 years of weird things depicted in each artwork. I had enough of it. With illustrations, I just want the mundane. I want peace.
End of #Spring, and beginning of #Summer here in #Greece. Everything's just turning hot... This is a painting I did in December, but only now I have access to a scanner.
This is a #watercolor painting I did a few months ago but hadn't share, until we bought a scanner here in #Greece. It arrived today, I scanned the painting under #Debian#Linux without any issues (or additional drivers), and I fixed the colors with #Gimp. It's the first time I use The Gimp for my paintings (I've used The Gimp on and off since its inception, but not for my artworks). I've been using #Photoshop instead for my collages and paintings, but I stopped my #Adobe subscription a few months ago. It's all #Foss now.
A new painting after a long time... Not sure I have it in me anymore...
I had to paint some swallows because they're trying to make a nest in our house. Unfortunately, that part of the house is going to be sealed off within 2-3 months (it currently is wide open because our house is not finished, and because if we don't seal off that part, we can't get house insurance), so the worst thing that could happen to them is not being able to return to their babies. So we keep destroying their barely-started nest, daily (because they keep coming back). It sounds cruel, but it's the right thing to do. We already have another swallow nest on an external part of the house, and that's all good. We love to have them there, swallows are great and very smart birds.
Happy Sunday! I’m very excited about this new direction in #landscape#painting that #gouache has opened up for me. I painted these all in the last month or so. They’re each on a 6” square piece of Arches hot pressed cotton paper. The bottom right one is still available in my Etsy shop, gwenbeads.
The flexibility of #painting landscapes is quite freeing. I’ve always been challenged by drawing proportions just right, but with a landscape, it doesn’t matter if things are off by a little. So here is another #landscape, number 8, this one with a dog and a patch of snap dragons. The large plant at the right front is an homage to Dr. Seuss, truly an artistic genius. I’m also influenced by Klimt and Van Gogh.
Happy Color Wheel Wednesday to all who celebrate! This is my second color wheel in #gouache. This one features vanadium yellow, which is the most expensive gouache color I own. Vanadium is one of the elements in the periodic table. It’s super lightfast, very opaque lemon yellow. This is the first time I have tried it. I’m a fan. Also, if you rotate the image, the illusion might flip from an innie to an outie.
This is my first color wheel in #gouache. It feels quite different from all the ones I painted in watercolor. The colors are so flat. I used a basic mixing set of five tubes to mix all of these colors. It’s so satisfying to mix all the different colors, and then put them all in order, like solving a puzzle with color. #painting#ColorWheelWednesday
I’ve been #painting with #gouache for over two months, and I realized I hadn’t used it to paint a color wheel yet! This shows the range of colors you can make with red, yellow, black, and white. Adding a tube of blue will be enough to finish the rest of it. #ColorWheelWednesday
It took me almost 5 years of regular practice to find the painting style I was looking for. I had a fuzzy vision of what I wanted but I had to improve my skills to meet it. So I did lots of practice drawing and #painting. Part of my path was to paint lots of color wheels and color studies of all different sorts. I read books on drawing and practiced perspective and shading. I did botanicals and portraits from photos. I never thought I’d land on landscapes as my subject. #gouache#watercolor
Lately I’ve been #painting#landscapes with #gouache paint, which is another name for opaque #watercolor. Someone asked me what style this is. I guessed that it’s in the style of folk art, but then I suppose that makes me folksy, which feels weird as a California woman living in the Silicon Valley suburbs.