Peek-a-Boo completed

Armed with green gold, olive green, perylene green and sap green I began this painting adventure.  Although the lily pads took a lot of concentration - they were fun to paint.  Monochromatic.   But fun none the less.  The little leopard frogs were trickier to scketch in than they were to paint.  Almost my favourite bits of painting are the tiny little bugs.  I had to take my glasses off to work on them.


The work in progress post is just below!

Work in progress - 'Peek-a-boo"

We have a backyard pond.  The novelty has never worn off.  Each season it is different - offering us many new things to enjoy, much like a natural lake.  Only much, much smaller.  In the spring we have froggie visitors that delight us.  And last night - a frog spooked me when it jumped in front of my path into the pond. 

In the summer months, the lily pads and water lilies captivate us.  They are really parking spaces for dragon flies and darners and the likes.

We make a point to visit each day and look for the changes. What is ready to bloom, what has grown seeming overnight, you get the idea. The daily feeding the kio and gold fish are a huge part of this routine as well.  (We really do not necessarily like to talk about the daily cleaning of the filter basket and other pond maintenance activities that presented this year.)  

We sit on our deck in the evenings and wish the pond was really the ocean with waves or a huge lake.  We imagine the sounds of waves lapping at the shores.  And on more than one occasion during the times of high temps and humidity wished it was large enough to swim in.

So, it is not a stretch that I must paint it (er… again).  The lily pads and water lilies are from our pond.  The leopard frogs are actually residents at the pond at Hooper’s Studio in Hampton, NB.  Their pond is also small and is providing haven to over 40 leopard frogs (at last count).  Beside their pond is a rather large net.  When I inquired what the net was for I was told to catch the bullfrogs.  My puzzled look brought about this explaination “they eat the leopard frogs so Kathy catches them and relocates them to another area of the yard”.   I love this story.

Anyway, after photographing the frogs I knew I need to incorporate a few of them into this painting.  Along with the odd lacewing and dragon fly.  Enjoy looking for them. Peek-a-boo!

Petunia Cascade

I have been working on this painting for about three weeks now.  Between the layering of colors and alternating with masking compound and waiting for it all to dry.  I am so not patient!

I love how deep and rich the colors are.  I went back in with magenta and a really bright pink to add more detail and create more dimension. And of course, viridian green and indigo for the leaves.

After I removed the masking compound and sat back to look at the work - it reminded me of a serigraph print.  I actually thought about leaving it as is.  It had depth and the shaped were interesting.  But, being who I am, I had to go back in with more detail.

Interesting enough, the most difficult stage of this painting was titling it.

WIP - Poured painting of petunias - fingers crossed

This painting is being developed by careful planning and a solid preliminary drawing, pour an application of paint and then mask then repeat.  To get to this stage, the work has gone through six paint pours and six mask applications. I masked our the white areas initially then poured a light shade of pink.  There were three pink pours in total and two shades of green and one of dark blue.

Removing the masking compound is a bit of a work out and somewhat stressful.  The work has to be completely dry prior to removal.  One of the key elements of this method is to not allow the mask to sit on the paper for too long.  Also, I am nervous when I think I should use a hair dryer to accelerate the drying process.  I am really timid that the mask will bond to the paper and ruin the effort.

I am at the stage now where I soften us any harsh edges created my masking.  Then I will start to further develop the painting.  Although this method is laborious, it it still faster than my normal approach.  At least this is what I tell myself.