February 2017 – Sunshyne Art & Design

Harmony

Another intuitive painting….because they are so much fun to do! And very mind freeing, too. 🙂 I love to play with color, and I love to play with layering and different effects.

Started out as usual…with blocks of my fave colors…using acrylics. Found some old crackle gel medium in my stash of stuff…and while it had gobbed up quite a bit from age, I used it anyway. Instead of letting it do its crackle thing, though, while the top paint coat was still a bit wet, I stuck a chunk of cotton ribbon on it, and pulled it off, and what I got was a very cool distressing, which revealed the bottom color layer….like it had “weathered”. Love it!

Did the crackle thing in this section too, and also used my homemade circle stencil, with modelling paste, to create more texture. Also stuck a word on there. 🙂

Colored the circles and painted a nice contrasting color around them…plus some “sun bursting” around my word. 🙂

Used some crackle paste next…which is a different species of crackle medium. lol

It is opaque, and has more of a cracked plaster feel. After it dried, I spritzed it with water, then added thinned down paint, and let it do its thing. Added a couple of my homemade stamps in there too….daisy, and a swirl. Love using those! 🙂 Building up more and more layers, as well.

I added some more words, some sgraffito, little dots here and there, and the finished painting turned out beautifully! Color is my joy. 😀

Find it as prints and also on a wide array of other products, at my society6 shop! 🙂

harmony271634-cases — Click pic for link! 🙂

Serenity

So, I’m on this intuitive painting kick, where I start with a blank canvas(been working with wooden ones lately), and just add color and go where IT wants to go, not a direction I lead it in.

I love to play with colors, and their relationships to each other, and I love trying out new effects…or surface treatments. It is very fun to see which direction my painting will go, and what color combinations I can achieve when I do this.

I started this one with just laying down a blue background, and then using lots of water, adding white spots to it. I like the soft edge effects I get when the canvas is wet, and I add the color onto it, and it spreads like it does when using watercolour. I used thin consistency acrylics. I glazed a bit of magenta over some parts of it, after it had dried, then used modelling paste through a stencil to add a flower.

At that point I knew I wanted to go with some kind of flower theme. I added another large flower, then when the paste was fully dry, glaze painted them with multiple layers of color. I also added more color, using glazes and water effects.

I liked what I ended up with, and then needed to decide if it was finished, or not…sometimes a tough decision!

daisyish

I decided it needed more, and I wanted to employ my newly handmade flower stamps. Instead of stamping directly onto the canvas, I printed the flowers onto tissue paper, so I could arrange them to my satisfaction. The amazing thing(I found out doing it) with the tissue paper is that it required no glue to adhere it! All I did was wet down the area where it was to be placed, and it stuck itself to the canvas! And the white parts nearly completely disappeared, to leave just the black printed parts, and the blue background. Very cool! I then glazed a bit of color over them, and painted around the edges a bit….just to make sure they were stuck! lol

I needed to incorporate line into it, so I added a few flowers on tall stalks, did some more color tweaking, and ended up with “Serenity”. I love it. I love the colors, and the joyful subject matter. I know when I succeed at a painting if it makes me happy looking at it. 🙂

Side Crafts With A Purpose

Recently I discovered how much fun it is to make my own stamps…using play foam sheets, and scraps of mat board. 🙂

I originally wanted to make a few to use in my mixed media paintings, because to buy stamps at the craft store requires a small fortune!! ugh!

Anyway, I had seen it done in one of my many art reference books, and being that play foam is about $1-2/package of 4 sheets at the dollar store, and I have loads of scrap mat board gathering dust, it was looking like a nice economical option.

So, I set out to make some swirls, and ended up making hills, a tree, flowers, hearts, peace signs, a sea horse, a sun, a dolphin, and even a whole mountain landscape(not pictured)! I couldn’t seem to stop…it was so much fun! I made a few more than one or two that night! lol

I just cut the shapes, used white glue to attach them to the mat board, then when they were stuck, distressed them with various metal tools, to get texture marks, and add interest.

They work well even with full strength watercolour! I am happy with how they turned out. 🙂

flower stamps.jpg

I also tried to make stencils with a glue gun. It was loads of fun to do, too! Haven’t tried them yet, though. I need to figure out how to make them lay flatter! 😛