Butterfly Vase

 Butterfly Vase

(Acrylic and collage on watercolour paper, 12x12 in)

Following another online prompt from Este MacLeod, I made the butterfly and then had to find something to do with it! It became quite a struggle.

I made the butterfly by simply folding paper over some paint and ink. After I'd cut it out, I stuck it to a sheet of watercolour paper and made everything else up. The red-brown vase is another piece of watercolour paper I used to clean my palette. The green leaves I found online.

Snails on a Cloth

 

Snails on a Cloth

(Acrylic on paper, 20 x 18.5 cm)

Something to distract me from pictures of Staithes, this resulted from an online prompt from Este MacLeod. Maybe there should have been some ladders too?

Course Project 3

Project 3 WIP (Acrylic on canvas)

I'm really enjoying this online course run by Este Macleod, because it has certainly thrown me out of my comfort zone and I find myself producing pictures which I couldn't predict before I started. 

This latest is being developed from a canvas prepared with several layers of mark-marking, following Este's guidelines:

Course Project

Project 1 Day 1 
(Acrylic on canvas) 

The day began with panic at having to abandon all control and simply follow the instructions. My initial reaction was, this is never going to work. But fairly soon after, things began to pull together and reached a point where I was rather pleased with the look of the thing. 

Of course, I've gone beyond that now and am at the point of wondering how it will ever really come together.

Under advice from Este (who insists she would never finish a painting in a day), I'm putting it to one side until tomorrow.

On Course

I think I mentioned when beginning work on my wooden heart, that I'd signed up for an online painting course. It's with Este MacLeod and it started this week. Este's paintings are nothing like mine; her background is in textiles, she paints in an abstract manner and she uses acrylics, on this course Golden Fluid Acrylics. All of which I thought would throw me out of my comfort zone and maybe give me a push in a different direction.

It already feels like it's working. There's that old feeling of finding water unpredictable and uncontrollable and relief to find that she uses mostly acrylic medium to thin her paint. But not knowing, and finding out how paint and colour will behave is a getting-back-to-basics strategy and is truly fascinating.

At the top of this post is one of the colour exercises and here's a couple of pages of fanciful flowers put together, quite quickly, from deconstructed fruit and veg.

More as things unfold.