Crazy colour creations on canvas

Spring is def here now. Actual warm sunshine, brilliant green leaves on all the trees and quite a lot of blossom still decorating the paths when I cycle around.

It’s wonderful to have the good weather arriving but then again, the longing to be outside does battle with the need to be inside when I’m doing arty stuff. Sculpting isn’t so bad since I can gather my bits and bobs and go sit under a tree or whatever but painting isn’t do-able outside. Not when I’m dithering every five minutes about what to do next.

So yes, the abstract in training continues with several pieces in various stages of completion. Not had another shot at the dance one. I might just chalk (paint?) that one up to a bad idea. As you can see, the crazy colour one has had some work done. It’s better but I don’t know if it’s any good. What do you reckon?

The last week or has mostly been messing with a mix of acrylic paint and inks. My Inktense watercolour pencils, eminently controllable and whose colours pop out like crazy when you add water are pouting and saying ‘what about us? Remember how versatile we are?”

Okay, trying not to go overboard and throw everything on the canvas (Ha! No, really!) so started with three small 15x15cm canvases with glued on tissue paper - as much wrinkling as possible without ripping the paper.

And begin. Backgrounds first then look at where the interesting textured areas are, choose a small number of colours (aiming for three but I can change the shade a bit). Keeping to a limited number is hard. So I go and do this one.

Let’s see…counting three shades of green, two kinds of yellow, burnt umber, a shimmering gold kinda thing, a bit of red-orange and a dash of violet. Oh, and there’s still a bit of another red that got mostly covered up. Ahem, so much for restraint.

Managed to keep the background pretty muted with a soft green spotted in a bargain box at the weekend and some grey...which also got mostly covered up. I went in with a bit more white to break up the blocks of colour and it’s not bad looking. There's some vertical bits that haven't worked as the white over pale grey and green kept drying out before I could get the lines right so have to fix that.

The challenge is to not head for the super-bright tubes every time. Lesson: often, subtle can be just as effective. The green-yellow-orangey combo is inspired from a summer top I bought years ago. I'll use that mix again for sure. But maybe just one shade of each.

The other two small ones had their backgrounds calmed down too. The blue one is much less blue and in the end, I didn’t like how the colours sat together so they got painted over, then a bit of modelling paste was added since the paper didn’t have much happening texture-wise. I haven't tackled V.2 yet and not quite sure about the pink/green one so will save those pix for next blog. Lesson: less is best for backgrounds.

These all took way too long to do for my liking but at least I've got some bits I actually like so it's not a total train wreck. Still want to incorporate some dance related shapes in some of my work and I have a vague kind of idea of how to do it but just not the actual method of how to use the paint. Guess that's the next week's work.