Showing posts with label palette knife. Show all posts
Showing posts with label palette knife. Show all posts

Saturday, June 30, 2012

Party time at the studio

Last night was our June Friday Night Painting Party. It was a full house and a hit! We had a great time, met some new friends and laughed a lot. A huge thanks to all our students who make these parties so much fun for us to teach. I'm already looking forward to July's party.

Everyone looks pretty serious when they're getting started.

 Here everyone is getting some blending techniques down working on their skies.

 This was the first time many of them had ever used a palette knife, there was only a little bit of panic. Once they got the hang of it, it was all good :)

Happy people and pretty paintings. 


Friday, October 1, 2010

Getting Unstuck

There are times when you hit a brick wall. I guess this is one of those times. I'm working my way through it though. This canvas has had a landscape painting on it twice now. The sky is gold leaf and that hasn't changed at all. Everything below that however has changed multiple times. It started out with a red base coat, palette knife work put the landscape greens down and it just wasn't working. I took out a nice big brush and painted over all the land with another layer of red. Again, with some knife work and brushes, putting in the greens and yellows of the prairie. Again, hated it! This time I took out a nice big palette knife and smeared red on top - again. There's a wonderful rough texture going on, I like that part and when I put the red on this time the knife skipped here and there and left wonderful peeks of greens coming through. I may have an inch of texture built up on this thing by the time I'm done but that's okay. I'm liking it a little more each time I paint over it.

This is one that I thought was done. Funny how our vision changes with time and it's not something the eye doctor can fix. I took it out again and studied it.........

and this is where it is now..... gessoed over and new color washed on. When I did the gesso layer I left some of the original blue showing through, I liked the texture in that area. Now I'm building up layers of color and sanding in between to bring back some of the contrasting color.

I don't know where these pieces are going to end up but that's part of the fun. When I'm stuck and can't figure out where I'm going I drag out old canvases and play with them. I'll let you know how it goes.

Have a great weekend,
Carlynne









Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Wow, it's early

Good morning. I have no idea what I'm doing up. I've been awake since 3:30 so I just gave up the tossing and turning and came out here to the computer to mess around. So.....here's an acrylic landscape just for the heck of it. This was really fun to do. One of these days I'm going to do some more like this. I toned the canvas with red first and did the landscape with a palette knife. The sky and some highlights on the ground and tree trunk are gold leaf.

I have a question for any photographers out there. Are there any tricks to getting gold leaf to read a little better in a photo? I know it won't be the same no matter what but it would be nice to get some of the effect of the golden glow.

Back to bed, maybe I can fall asleep in time for the alarm to go off......
peace,
Carlynne