Burridge Style

It is a fact that one of my favorite artists is Robert Burridge. In the past I have traveled many miles to take workshops with him. He truly makes painting fun. Because for me sometimes painting isn't fun. With him there are really no real rules, lots of slinging paint and ending up with something that looks fun. Sometimes they are turkeys but at least it was fun. It's just paper--chunk it!

I do appreciate all my oil painting instruction. And I do love to oil paint but sometimes, for me, it's more stressful than fun. That's because there are rules, rules rules that you have to abide by to get a good painting (composition, value, good drawing, brush strokes, warm and cool colors working together--etc)  That is if you want to paint in the classic way. Of course you can sling oil paint too. But for now I think I am going to just sling some acrylic and see what happens. No rules---just fun.

DLP Week 15--Monochromatic

This week's challenge was to create a page in all monochromatic colors.
No, it's not belated St. Patty's Day but it ended up looking like it didn't it? Well, maybe I should have chosen blue as my color except I love green and I love spring.  I made some of the flowers from the deli paper and did a little calligraphy and spraying. It was fun!

Happy Earth Day--one day late

Just wanted to remind anyone who might be new to my blog about my Calligra-FUN class to learn to write like this using brush markers. I have been so encouraged that all of my 136 students have been pleased with the class and had fun!!! They all did such wonderful work and it made me so very happy to see that the students really could achieve great success with this type of letterform after taking the class---and during! I also have an Italic Calligraphy class if you want to learn a classic calligraphy letterform that will get you on the right track for calligraphy.

Lettering with these markers is very addicting and you can doodle and play and write in your journal and it just...makes you happy! It's my therapy!

And...here I am in the pants

I fly by the seat of my pants sometimes when I create art!

Drop in some color--on the paper!!

Have you ever had a day where you are just out of sorts...clumsy, feeling fat...and just kinda mad for no real reason? So, to make myself feel better I just wanted to drop in a little color into something and maybe write something in calligraphy so I sat down and dropped some india ink and Dr. Martins concentrated watercolor into these little flowers. My hand hit the little bottle of the magenta india ink and it "dropped in" all over my pants and sprayed my new Talbots shirt. Why do I paint with nice clothes on?! ARGGG!!! (#$##@%#--aka gosh dang it--and that's southern for... oh shoot!) Oh well, I felt fat in the pants anyway but the shirt had pink flowers on it and it splashed into the pink flowers and ...well on the bright side... it didn't even show! That was a miracle--really! So the moral of the story is...among any tragedy there is always a little miracle. The pants are a goner though.

The Flower Goddess

The image above is with a filter from my "Totally Rad" program that really does put totally rad actions on photos and paintings. Pretty cool, huh? I could go on and on with the totally rad filters. The original is below.

She does look rather goddess-like and actually kinda Cher-like with all the flowers in her hair. I am so tired of painting hair the same way over and over so I thought I would try something different. The background is paint and stamps and brayers and more stamps and wax paper mono stamping and script stamps and toilet paper circles. I did add the flower goddess text in a circle in Photoshop just so I wouldn't forget how to do that. She has been enhanced somewhat in PS and just a few butterfly stamps added. I should be Christmas shopping rather than painting a flower goddess. Maybe someone will receive a Flower Goddess as a Christmas present! I probably will add some sort of quote but not sure about that. Have a wonderful day, my friends!

Mystery Flowers

These are painted over collage although the collage and if you come in close you see can a bit of the collage peeking through. The top image you will se some distress crackle paste that I thought was almost dried up but crackled very quickly and I guess I should go ahead and use it up before it completely dried out. I like using this crackle paste from Ranger. It gave the top image an interesting texture. Both of these are on a 5 x7 canvas and I am planning to put them into Etsy later today.

Orange Stitch flowers

This is a watercolor wash background for the pedals and a much too watery script stamp in the background. Probably, the lettering could have been left off of this one but I think I just wanted to put the little dew drop on the leaf with a little faux crystal. Do you see it? It's not good with the scan and I tried to fix it a bit but that didn't help. I am also not that crazy about Tagore---what does this quote mean anyway???  Rhetorical question--

Bernie did a good job but I do think I need that walking foot. Hopefully soon. So if I had it to do all over again, I'd not use the script stamp and put just the lettering.  Both together makes it a bit busy but---it is what it is...art du jour!

More Painted Photos

The top image is the painted photograph and the second is the actual photograph of Macaulay's birthday flowers from Marc. I actually printed this one with a Photoshop pallet knife filter to help further separate the colors then I painted it with acrylic. All of these things are trial and error, just trying different ways to paint it.  It is a 5 x 7. 

It is a dog or---three flowers??

Can you tell what it is?? It is a little pink Scottie dog or is a miss-happen flower painting? I will leave that up to you! :) Have a wonderful day.

Sunday Sunflower Ditty

Happy Sunday to all!

It's warmer today here in Jacksonville, FL, hence the Sunflower ditties for todays blog post. It will be a high of 65 which is much better than our freezing temps. Floridians aren't used to that!

The flowers took about 3 minutes and the lettering took about 30 secomds so I guess this was more of a 31/2 minute ditty. Instant gratification---aahhhhhh!!! That probably says a lot about my personality doesn't it??