As I mentioned last week, I just finished the big cross stitch piece that I’ve been working on for the past nine months. I wasn’t sure whether to start a new stitching project or whether to work on some new artwork. For now, I decided to work on some new drawings and paintings and then I will probably turn those into cross stitch patterns. I just moved to Victoria, BC and it’s absolutely beautiful here. Even though it’s just turned into autumn, there are still so many flowers in bloom and so many lovely gardens around town.
Because of being surrounded by such lovely gardens, I’ve decided to do a series of floral paintings. Now anyone who knows me knows I’m not really into florals, particularly very traditional florals. But I am very much into vivid bright colours, so I thought it would be a good way to get back into my drawing and painting skills and take advantage of all the lovely flowers surrounding me. As you can see in the photographs, I’ve done one chalk pastel painting of a white rose. It was interesting to do as I was experimenting with one of the blending modes in ArtRage. I was blending the colours together in “wet” mode and it almost ended up looking like a watercolour. I’m not so keen on using watercolours in general as they can be quite insipid looking, and I like layering thicker colours and blending them that way. However the wet blend mode created some interesting effects which I like.
I’ve also just started a new painting using oils in ArtRage, and this one is of some yellow flowers. I think they are dahlias, but I’m not sure as I’m absolutely horrible with any kind of gardening. It makes my mum crazy as she’s so good at gardening and my parents used to run a 70 acre orchard, but I definitely do not have a green thumb. I barely even know what some of the more basic flowers are called, but that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy them and use them as material for my art. I was looking at some of George O’Keefe’s famous floral paintings, and I like how she focused on the shape of the flowers and the petals. Some of her paintings almost looked like abstracts rather than traditional florals because she zoomed in so much on a part of the flower. I think that looks really neat and shows the intricacy of the flower, as they are all so unique. I’m not too concerned about accurately replicating the colour of the flowers as I do like experimenting with colour, and currently I’m experimenting using Pantone’s spring colour palette for 2016. It’s a good experiment for me to try and limit myself to certain colours only and see what comes out.
So that’s it for now, if you have any questions or comments of course please feel free to let me know below. I may well do a video demonstration of some of the techniques I use in ArtRage at some point as it such a neat program and I really enjoy using it.
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