Off the Beaten Path

I leave for Stampaway tomorrow morning but wanted to get some thoughts out before I head out of town.  I am so excited to be teaching my Tattered and Torn class on Friday.  I love to put together assymetrical designs and the happenstance of the coloration techniques for the papers.  I hope everyone enjoys it.  I am also tickled to be teaching at Simply Said on Saturday morning before heading back to St. Louis.  I love to work with USArtQuest's Studio Cloth so the class will be a fun one for me as well.  What else will be fun in Cincy?  Well, that would be Graeter's and my usual trip to Jungle Jim's, the potato bar at the preview party on Friday night, and the company of my friends.I've been frantically trying to finish a new painting to take to Cincy and I am happy to say that I did finish it this morning.  "Off the Beaten Path"  seemed to be an apt name for it since it was quite a wonky piece throughout.  Though not a real tutorial, I will put some pictures up of the layers like the last one so the process can be understood.  It still amazes me how each layer adds interest and builds into the final surface layer.

I am very happy with the outcome and even happier to debut my new line of stamps on it.  It's one of the first chances I've had to really play around with them.  They still make me smile.  They are available unmounted or mounted in my Etsy Shop.  Have a great weekend everyone!!!!

Go Big or Go Home

So......... It's the absolute wrong time of the year in my life right now to try to do something different, out of the box, scary, time-sucking, but this is the time that I chose to try working on larger canvases for my paintings.  My forum turned out to be an online class called "FUNKY LITTLE CITYSCAPES" by Jodi Ohl.  Jodi embraces a whimsical style in the same vein as my own so when I saw this class advertised, I knew it was meant to be.  I think everyone in the class is having a fantastic time.  Some are even on their second or third paintings and it's only been a little over a week that the class has been in session.  That's a testament to a good class.  I took a few pictures along the way to show you some of the different layers that went into this painting.  I won't do an in-depth tutorial, but  will post the pictures so you can get an idea how much underpainting went into it to get the visual texture in the finished painting.  My inspiration was Italy and the cities that are built into the mountainsides so I chose a Tuscan palette and stuck fairly to it. We were given the option to spot underpaint our canvases so I chose to do black before I added some "noise" with crayon.

I then chose my palette, portrait composition, and painted the background with a combination of palette knife and credit card. Some white paint was added to create some interest throughout the background. I chose some of my favorite Stencil Girl stencils to help with that interest.

The next layers included sketching out the house arrangement and layering on several layers of color.

More layers of paint were added before the detailing begins, first with paint on the houses, and then with India Ink and nibs.

The final touches included some shadowing, gold metallic and black noise,  and  detailing with white Krylon Paint Pen.

"Tuscan Interlude" 12" x 30"