Come Paint With Me

Sorry its been a while since I posted but I have been very busy with two sick little girls, and I have been working on a new painting. It is bigger than what I usually paint, this canvas size is 15"x30". I am going to continue to work on bigger canvases to change things up a bit. Its more challenging and more time consuming for sure. I wanted to bring you into my art room with me, so that you can see the painting process I go through. I love learning about other artists, and find it very interesting to see their techniques. So here we go!




It was very challenging to come up with something that was going to be larger scale, because I am so use to working with small canvases. Some of the things that I paint would look weird blown up this big. The top left corner is some card stock I was drawing on the night before with sharpie markers, and here is the idea I had in mind. I first did a vanilla color as the base and began to do the pattern of waves. The next thing was the whale tail coming out of the water. Do you like my paper plate palette, lol?



I wanted to put the three colors stacked throughout the whole painting to give it that retro look that I love. So the water was next. The bottom of the tail starts with the yellow, and the end of the water spout ends with the yellow as well. That progression of color looked best. These are just the first coats of paint to test colors I had used in the sketch.



Here it shows the end result of the whole concept.....but I wasn't feeling the blue. I tried brown on top and it went better in my opinion. So I went on to test out the brown on the waves as well to be sure.



There it was, brown and looking good, but I still felt something was off balance! To me, there looked to be too much open space which made it looked unfinished. So I added more big splashes of water below the tail, and I think it worked. All I had to do was put a couple of more coats of paint, and do touch ups on the edge of some messy lines. I am pretty picky about clean lines. It bothers me to see edges that are sloppy (well in my art anyway).



And here it is, the end result. I like it, and it is beginning to grow on me with every hour! I am enjoying it hanging in the living room right now. I don't know if I will sell it and for how much. I may donate it to an auction that my friend asked me to donate a piece of art to. I still have to name it ...sigh...any ideas?

I hope you enjoyed an inside look of my painting process. Nothing fancy, just basic sketches blown up bigger with a little color to bring it to life!