Making Art

Over Easter I am participating in a local art exhibition to launch our local Arts Trail. In preparation, I spent the whole day in the studio working on ongoing pieces and planning new ones.  For quite awhile I've been working on a giant rose painting - about 1m x 85cm. I set myself a goal of using only three colours red, white and black to paint this rose and I'm not sure it will be an experiment that provides the best painting as an result.  I shall persevere though. Because I didn't use my artist diary to document how I mixed the colours I have run into difficulty at different stages throughout the process when needing to remix colours as I ran out.  NOTE. TO. SELF.  USE - ARTIST'S DIARY.

The Process.

After priming the canvas I painted a solid pink colour over the whole canvas and sketched on the rose using a white pastel pencil.  Hard to see but may show up better if you click on the image.

I then started to paint the outer petals and progressively moved in towards the centre.

This is where I stopped weeks and weeks ago.  I continued today but have used a different camera and for some reason it has altered the colour and has minimized the red.  The above photo is truer to the real life colours.

I still have to complete the very centre of the rose. It's an indiscriminate blob at present so needs to be refined.  You get a little peep at my studio (formerly known as the Granny Flat) in the background.

I also primed watercolour paper ready to collage and three canvases of different sizes ready to paint.....  I used gesso.

I worked on a thumbnail sketch for a new, small painting in the hard edge semi-abstract style that I used for this painting.  Even managed to transfer most of the image onto canvas ready to start painting.

I spent time gathering reference material and ideas for another few pieces into my artist's diary.  Lesson learned.

This is the table where I work on thumbnails, do charcoal and graphite drawings or gaze dreamily into my garden.

I hope to have the rose finished by my next post and some better photos for you.  Thinking of you all.