Thursday, December 6, 2012 at 11:10AM
On a trip to the farmer's market the other day, I found this glorious little creature, a romanesco broccoli! I couldn't wait to take one home and photograph it....
Anyone know a great recipe for the romanseco? It's almost too beautiful to cook!
Tuesday, December 4, 2012 at 1:30AM I have the great opportunity every year to represent Golden Paints at a small trade show at Continental Art Supply in Reseda, CA for their annual Teacher Night. For Teacher Night this year, I demo'd many of Golden's exciting products, including the OPEN paints. Here is a sample image of a printmaking technique with the OPEN paints. Due to their extended dry time, you can use them to simulate the look and feel of oil-based paint products. During my Teacher Night demo I used a brush and worked some OPEN colors over a sheet of freezer paper then pulled two prints... the first (left) was made on a sheet of Strathmore Mixed Media paper that I had coated ahead of time with a thin layer of Soft Gel (you can use any sheen)...what came about was something that looks like a block print. The image on the right was made on the same paper but uncoated with a gel, and dampened first with water so that more of the pigment would release on the print...the end result is something that looks more ethereal, like a stain of watercolor. I just love how these images are so different but they share so many common traits. I'm looking forward to printing more of these at home!
Tuesday, October 9, 2012 at 1:12AM I'm slowly returning to my regular schedule after having a successful art opening followed by my first mini-vacation since the holidays last year. Before getting back to acrylic and art related posts, I thought I would share a selection of photos from the last few weeks!
Art Reception at the Jeremy Clark Salon
A few of the new paintings...working with a couple different styles, all from the same series of antique photographs
Some of my favorite shots from Bodie, CA
Yosemite National Park
Wednesday, September 5, 2012 at 11:26PM
I'll be showing some new paintings in a couple weeks and have been really excited with how the series is turning out. After so many years of painting women, I'm now broadening my creative journey by now painting some men as well. My hair stylist opened a great new spot and I jumped at the chance to some new work there... since the show is at a salon, I thought a great theme would be women being pampered paired with images of men that are dapper gentlemen. Here is a peek of one of the new paintings for the show:
I'm having so much fun working from deguerrotypes of men and vintage photographs of women! The new series will include several portraits as well as multi-figure paintings and some mixed media works. I hope to see you there!!
Monday, August 27, 2012 at 1:40PM My last post touched on how to seal pastels with acrylic mediums...I've been having SO much fun with this process and have started a new series of small works using image transfers, pastel pencils, and acrylic color and mediums...
In this series, only the flesh tones were rendered in pastel pencil. I made image transfers of my drawings, coated them with a layer of Acrylic Ground for Pastels (this product is magic), then applied my pastels over the ground. Blending with your finger or a blending stump will help compact the pigment powders, but you can also burnish the entire image with a sturdy tool...just lay down a sheet of vellum over your image before burnishing. Once this step is complete, you can pour on clear acrylic mediums and manipulate them gingerly over your surface with a palette knife (here I used Clear Tar Gel), being careful not to make contact or scrape the surface of your image with the knife...as if you were icing a cake vs. buttering toast.
Once my acrylic medium was dry, I was then able to add more color on top of my image using a series of glazes to bring life to the rest of my image transfer. At the drawing stage, if you keep in mind to have a nice range of grayscale value, you can use your image transfer as a modern grisaille!