A Very Easy Abstract - Flowers Again

The other day I just wanted to throw something together very quickly and saw an ink and acrylic work on the net that was quite pretty, so I had a go too, and this is what I came up with.  Love the colours.  This is definitely not an original one. 

Flowers - ink and acrylic

An Abstract (Barb Style)

As I mentioned some time ago I am studying painting at TAFE, and part of our course a few weeks ago required us to paint an abstract using a formula of some straight lines, circles, zigzags, and curved lines.  This is the painting I did in class - rough but quite interesting.

TAFE Class Work - abstract

As a result of that I decided I needed to do a real canvass abstract at home.  For my colour scheme, I thought I would try an analagous colour scheme in the blue/blue-green/violet/red violet range.  However, when I put the painting together I thought it was pretty boring, so I decided to ditch it.  Which led me to throwing the rest of my leftover paint at it, using a palette knife (my absolute favourite tool).  I began to like it, and then added some extra colour with a little lemon and some magenta.  I still reckoned it needed something, so after a little thought I decided to sew some very very bright orange string onto it as well.  (I have been wanting to sew onto a painting for a while, and this was my first attempt!!) So here it is - unfortunately the photo is not so good!!

"Orange string"





Mixed Media - Going Shopping



"Going Shopping" or alternatively "Face in the Window"

 It was time to have another go at a mixed media using collage and acrylic.  This painting originated from a photo of a painting by collage artist Mike Bernard (who does heaps of paintings of buildings), but once I got going on it, I thought the original needed something extra, so I added the lady on the rickety old ladies bicycle.  Then a couple of days later, I added the little dog, which I now think really finished the painting off. 

I have used newspaper to give texture to the walls and road surface, serviettes with aqua surrounds for the windows of the shop, and cutouts for the shop names, some of the washing on the line, and the face in the window upstairs.  The little dog was also a find on the internet, and I have painted over the original cutout to give more texture to it.  How many dogs have you seen running along the street, just like this one, chasing after a bicycle?

My effort at painting in the impressionist style



Garden at Leneva

 Thanks to ABC2's Forger's Masterclass again, some friends and I decided that we too needed to try our hand at a Monet, painting in the impressionist style.  So we arranged a day in the country, at sister-in-law Barb's place at Leneva, and set up our easels in her lovely olde worlde garden.  Barb had mowed the lawn for us, and there were heaps of things flowering, including lots of roses and the oleanders you can see in the middle ground. The day was lovely and cool, and just perfect for painting out of doors.  We had a lovely day, and we promised ourselves that we needed to do it all again soon.

 So here is my effort in the Monet style - that is, lots of daubs of colour to create an illusion of light.  In this case, I was surprised to find that by following Monet's technique, I was able to use colour to reflect the dappled morning light that shone through at about 9.30am when we started painting.  By 4.00pm, the light had completely changed, but thankfully the morning light effect had already been captured. I'm not sure if Monet would have used the tree trunks to frame his painting, but I just liked the look of it.