Painting Papers

Spent a beautiful warm sunny day outside yesterday painting papers to restock my palette.

Living in New England I don't have the luxury of mild year round weather...and I would much rather paint outdoors to keep the art room clean. So, that means grabbing those great summer days as I can get them.

I took all of my rice papers, book pages, etc out with me along with watercolors, acrylics, and some twinkling H2O's for an afternoon of fun!!

Luckily I have a great glass top table that is perfect for this. I can get it wet and messy and simply clean it off with the hose. Can't do that in the art room..lol

As you can see...I got quite a bit done. Now.... I need to find more time to actually do some paper making next. I'm starting to run out of those nice hand made pieces. That too is a messy process, so I'd rather grab some outside time for that as well.

That's also fun because you end up with papers you never even dreamed of creating!! Pure inspiration!

Paper prep

It was such a beautiful warm sunny day on Sunday that I decided to build up my stash of painted papers for future Torn Paper Painting pieces.

I took out rolls of rice paper and several old books as well. Sometimes I like to use text or music pages and it's always great if I've got some painted in just the color I need.

I spent the afternoon painting these papers and book pages in watercolors...twinkling H2O's...and acrylics!

As you can see....I've got lots of new pieces to use and didn't have to muck up my art room this time!

The Painted Inch

I don't usually join in too many "Inchies" swaps because...let's face it...doing art on 1"x1" isn't all that easy.

There are, however, some themes that come up that I simply can't resist! Can you even image me not joining a "seaside" themed inchie swap!?! Roc...you had me at "sea"!

Soo...I did little watercolor beach dune inches. Hope I never have to paint on a smaller scale than this!

The beginning

2010, the beginning of a new year...new decade. A fresh start once again.

I'm feeling positive about this one! I think everything is looking up and that this is going to be the beginning of many new and wonderful possibilities.

Cheers!!!

On the art site I trade on it is also a new year of doing "monthly challenges". I've started a new one that will be a "nature" challenge. It will change in themes from botanicals to animals each month as well as the format.

For the start of this new year it began with an artist's choice of flower in 4"x6".

My piece for this was this yellow iris.

I did the whole thing first in layers of watercolor then added in some small color changes in colored pencil. I added to the yellow a bit of "twinkling h2o's" but they aren't visible from the scan.

The background became a bit of an experiment for me. Since I wanted the other members to feel comfortabe in using whatever medium they felt best with, I needed to take it out of the purely watercolor stage. I decided to go with a rubber stamp. Using a random swirly stamp with a gray ink I stamped it with different pressures all over the background.

I'm honestly liking the end result even more than I first imagined. I think it's good for all of us to step out of our comfort zones now and then.

Happy New Year to all of you. May you step out of the old norm and shake it up a bit.

Never know what new and wonderful things lie ahead!