Catching Up

My goodness but it's been a long time since I posted. Not that I haven't been painting. I guess Life has just gotten in the way. I worked on this start from my mixed media workshop and I like it better, probably because it now has all three primary colors.

I also revisited the photo of the pastel, "Cheryl's Lake" that I posted on July 22. I did two more versions, one with acrylic paints and the other collaged with colored tissue paper. Neither is a masterpiece, but its a good exercise, I think, and makes me realize that the pastel is pretty dull looking. I'll work on that one the next time I put away the paints and get out the pastels. Here are the other 2. As usual, these will look brighter if you click on them for the larger versions.

Finally, I did these two which are called "Dreams" and "Dog Dreams." They were done as the result of a challenge to a small group I'm in. The challenge was to pick 2 colors which are complements to each other (opposite sides of the color wheel), add an earth tone, and paint anything using only those three colors. The colors I picked are a coral and peacock blue for the complements, and a gold for the earth tone. The image slowly formed in my head but it wasn't until I had it, as well as I could, on paper and looked at it for a while that I knew how to do it better. The first one has acrylic mat medium blotched on the paper before any paint . . . which didn't cover the medium. For the second, I used gesso for the texture. That takes watercolor, although differently from plain paper. I also planned the values better with a pencil value sketch.