Keep two, and pass one on.

Diane and I co-taught a session of SMALL Art to a group of fellow artists from the Arvada Fine Arts Guild on Mar 10^th.  This was a fun way to introduce friends to our challenge. Each artist worked on 3 pieces of paper together. Our objective was to allow all 3 paintings develope together without choosing any painting to work on exclusively from the others. 

Diane rollered yellow and peach over the surface of the work. When she lifted the paper strips she had preserved a number of white horizontal or vertical spaces on each painting.

She then added more strips of paper in the opposite direction and used her brayer to roll over a complimentry color - deep purple.

Diane brought an assortment of materials to use as stamping and mark making tools. In these 3 she used pine needles and scattered them over the surface of the paintings.

She used crushed aluminum foil to creat textured patterns over the surface of her paintings.

At this point Diane has made a decision to find floral patterns in her paintings. She is now working on one of them independently of the other.

Diane’s second painting is on the left. She selected one of the three paintings, the one she found least successful and passed it to me. I drew a bouquet on it with chalk after I found an image that appealed to me. I created a base and added a few shadows.

When we  instructed each student to select the painting they liked least that was not too difficult for them to do. When we asked them to hand it to the person on their right they were a little less enthusiastic. But in the spirit of the project they all did so. Then the task of finding a new painting in someone else' work became the most important objective, and a great deal of thought and care went into completion of the project. Below are the results.

Discoveries:

·         It’s easy to choose favorites until you must give one up.

·         When you are completing another person’s painting you have a greater appreciation of what your neighbor is doing with your work.

·         Experimenting and playing with painting is fun, so give yourself permission to be open to new possibilities.  

Social Networking, Put a Bird On It, series

Sometimes we need to find challenges to keep our art fresh. I have been painting so many women in my series,  Women I Might Have Known I thought I needed to take a small break and play with another subject, birds. I filmed in the right hand and painted with the left- so much for my film credentials.

This is a good example of creating a random painterly base with a variety of colors and stamping techniques. Although I did not set out with bird placement in mind, I had been painting birds and found myself looking for bird shapes and patterns. I also intended this to be large - something I never do. I used a similar method as in the Peach demo, of carving the bird shapes from the underpainting when applying the background.

Susan's discoveries:

• It's good to change up your subjects and methods. In this case birds and new sizes.
• If you plan in advance, the surface paint should be a compliment to the underpainting. In this case a rich wash of Quinnacridone Burnt Orange made a great surface to show through my sky. I mixed Quinnacridone gold with white and lots of matte medium for transparency, blending into  Liquitex blue-violet, white and matte medium.
• I used a stamp I carved on some of the surfaces and birds, discovering it made great abstract bark markings.

Happy painting.