Just do something different

This has been a weekend that turned out nothing like I expected it to. First, my plans for Saturday fell through not once but three times! Second, my small cold of last week has morphed into a sinus infection that is just not friendly. And third, I painted. A lot.

Probably because I have been doing a lot of realistic painting, something with lots of texture and color was calling my name. When I reorganized the studio a couple of week ago, I was able to put some paintings where I could actually look at them and ponder them. Yesterday they called my name and I decided to stop pussy-footing around and DO SOMETHING!

Teal Horse

Have you ever felt like you just needed a teal horse? After looking at this painting for the last two weeks, I decided teal was the only appropriate solution.

Now, this painting has been hanging around since 2016. In fact, it had ice painting applied to it (unsuccessfully) in late 2016.

Since then, I have had no ideas about what to do with it. I just kept thinking that I wished I could add some teal. So, on Saturday, I decided to use “gesso juice” (2 parts gesso, 1 part matte medium, 1 part water) to add some texture and white that I could then work on.

Well, at least it’s not the same. So, today I added a wash of teal to the dried gesso juice.

As I said… at least it’s not the same.

What are moons?

Again, harkening back to 2016, I got in a mood and started an abstract background. I didn’t manage to get a very good picture of this start.

Forgive the shadow…

At some point I drew a series of circles, intending to create moons and painted them with white gouache. I don’t have a picture of this step (add another painting to my unfinished total (I said 31, but it’s actually 33)), but the planets were not distinct enough, so I decided to use the leftover gesso juice to pop out those planets.

On NPR sometime in the last week, there was a story about how they had discovered 12 new moons on Juniper. Therefore, these are now moons, not planets.

The color was added with a combination of watercolor and acrylic with Gelli plate printing and also salt. I’m still not done, but I’m kind of digging it. And it’s different than it was.

Charge

Once again, I have done a terrible job of keeping track of progress. This painting started out with ice painting in 2016.

After my Ruth Ellen Hoag workshop, I know I drew and painted this on it.

I really like this, but I’ve been pondering (occasionally) how to get that lead horse to really pop out.

As we know, I can’t be left along with any sort of extra paint, so I decided to use the last of the gesso juice and see what happened.

Again… now it’s different. Some color might help.

I admit, I lost some streaks that I found appealing. But I’m not sure that this won’t work with some tweaking.

At least it’s different.