Monday

"Winter Twilight", mixed media landscape painting by Sharon Lynn Williams

"Winter Twilight", mixed media painting, 15 x 22"
SOLD 

I went back into my painting that I did at the Quiller workshop, posted on November 3rd. I felt that it really lacked some 'oomph', so I went back in and added some opaques into the background, lighting up the distant mountain shape, then added some teal and orange opaques into the snow area in the front, darkened the trees in the middle, played a bit more with counterchanges in the trees, and capped it all off with a moon just coming up behind the mountains. I like it much better now.

Enjoy!

To purchase this, or commission your own painting, please email me.

Saturday

"Spokane Evening", mixed media landscape painting by Sharon Lynn Williams

"Spokane Evening", mixed media painting on 300lb rough watercolour paper, 11 x 14"

I finally got around to finishing this painting I began while in Spokane. It is a memory of the wonderful park that is in the centre of downtown Spokane on the river. We walked through this park several times in the evenings on our way to restaurants in the area, and this view of the clock tower lit up in the starry night along with all the colourful fall trees, really captured my imagination. The clock tower is square actually -I did this painting from memory only, so I guess I missed that part!

Enjoy!

To purchase this, or commission your own painting, please email me.

Tuesday

"Sunset - Early Winter", acrylic landscape painting by Sharon Lynn Williams

"Sunset - Early Winter", acrylic painting, 5.5 x 10"

This is a demo painting that I did for my Monday Mixed Media class in which I was trying to show how to use acrylics transparently, translucently and opaquely. This is a scene that I am very familiar with living so close to the Rockies, although this is no mountain in particular.

Enjoy!

To purchase this, or commission your own painting, please email me.

Monday

"Looking Back", mixed media painting by Sharon Lynn Williams

"Looking Back", mixed media painting, 12 x 16"
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This is one of the paintings that I began at the Brommer collage workshop I took in September. I finally got around to finishing it- I was not sure what I wanted to do with the imagery in the bottom of the painting, and how to tie it to the top. The reddish shape in the lower right kept screaming 'person' so I went with it. The painting is about leaving home and looking back through the filters of our subsequent experiences.

Enjoy!

To purchase this, or commission your own painting, please email me.

Friday

"September Marsh ii", acrylic landscape painting by Sharon Lynn Williams

"September Marsh ii", acrylic painting on watercolour paper, 16 x 12"
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I often take my plein air oil paintings and use them as a taking off point for acrylic or mixed media studio paintings. This painting was done in acrylic for my Mixed Media class as a demonstration of how acrylics can be used transparently, translucently and opaquely to underscore a theme. The transparent reflections in this painting 'feel' different than the more opaque marsh grasses and distant trees. You can see my original oil painting on this blog page -scroll down to the entry for September 16/09. This painting's structure and format is a little different from the original -and it is interesting to see it in a different medium.

Enjoy!

To purchase this, or commission your own painting, please email me.

Sunday

Altered Books

As a creative endeavor, a group of 4 of my students and myself decided to do an altered book exchange. Each person was to get an appropriate book and choose a theme, and then complete 3 'spreads' (two facing pages) and then pass it on to the next person to do 3 spreads, etc, until everyone had worked in each others book. One of the members, Sheila, had recycling as her theme and the parameters were that you weren't allowed to use anything that you had purchased specially for the book ( ie: you had to recycle your art materials, etc.).
For this spread, after I painted the pages, I took some of the stuff that I found around our family's summer cottage, such as old Monopoly money, poker chips and a tiddly wink, a puzzle piece (from a puzzle that already had lost pieces!), some birch bark, and some maple and fern leaves along with a piece of a photo I took at the cottage.

This spread was fun! I glued about 1/2" of pages together and cut an opening out to hold a 3D cow I had made previously (at the Glenbow's exhibition of Joe Fafard's work -I just love going into the 'make it-take it' room and create with the kids!). I then cut 2 smaller openings to hold some bees (for some reason bees keep getting into my basement and then die there, leaving the most amazing intact specimens) which I poured self-leveling gel around to encase them. Then I covered the openings with a sheet of bingo paper I had bought previously from the scrapbooking store (great source of stuff!). On the facing page I glued a sheet of crossword scrapbook paper.

On this spread I decided to play with colour, and not worry too much about images. I decided to work with an interesting tertiary tetrad of yellow orange, red violet, blue green and yellow green. I used pieces cut from magazines, painted pages and a cut-out from a stamped card and then played with the design and colour placement. A great way to explore how colour schemes work together.
We are all getting together for our final party on Nov 24th, where we will get to see all the books completed and share experiences over a glass (or two) of wine. It has been a wonderfully creative experience, and I highly recommend it!

Enjoy!

To ask a question, or commission your own painting, please email me.

Thursday

Edmonton Show Invitation

Hello all. If you live in, or are visiting, the Edmonton area this weekend, I would like to invite you to come and see my show at the Centre d'Arts Visuels de l'Alberta gallery. The opening is Friday night from 7 to 8:30pm and the show runs until Nov 24th. I will have 19 framed and 18 matted paintings on display. This year I packed them all up and shipped them via Greyhound Bus Courier to save me the 6+ hours it would take me to drive them up myself. Certainly a good idea as nothing arrived damaged!

I am in the process of trying to find my studio after a hectic show season. I will post some photos when it is done as some of you are curious to take a peak.

Also, I have been notified by other blogger friends, that sometimes their blog posts that their subscribers received in their inboxes had formatting issues, with the text being superimposed over their images. I would appreciate it if you would let me know if this has happened to any of you. Thanks.

To talk to me or to commission your own painting, please email me.

Wednesday

"Marsh Reflections ii", mixed media landscape painting by Sharon Lynn Williams

"Marsh Reflections ii", mixed media painting, 16 x 12"
$625 framed, FREE S&H

This painting began as a demonstration for my "Painting Creatively with Watermedia" class on Mondays. The challenge was to paint with acrylics in a watercolour fashion, using the paint in a transparent way only. In the next class we explored using acrylics translucently and opaquely as well as transparently (I am not finished with that painting yet, but will post when I am). I was'nt happy with the way the transparent sky in the original demo just lay there, not adding anything to the life of the painting. I went back into the sky area with the same colour, but in
an opaque wash -wow, what a difference -the landscape just popped. I carried bits of opaque around the painting so that the sky wouldn't stick out as the only area of opaque paint. As acrylic isn't the best opaque media out there, the sky was a bit 'patchy', so I went over it with a watercolour wash of ultramarine blue, which gave it even more life as the granular pigment settled into the valleys of the watercolour paper. Yeah for mixed water media!

Enjoy!

To purchase this, or commission your own painting, please email me.

Friday

"Spirit Island Revisioned", acrylic landscape painting by Sharon Lynn Williams

"Spirit Island Revisioned", acrylic painting, 14 x 15"
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This is the last painting that I did at the Quiller workshop. My hope was that it would look like my work with just a touch of Steve's influence, and I think that I succeeded. It was great fun to paint, and went through several changes in focus since the original inception. My work with oils has made adding the opaque paint to the transparent areas easier to conceptualize. It is neat how working in one medium helps your work in a completely different medium.

I have been very busy with shows and preparations for more shows! I am in two shows this weekend and will have 40 works in a show in Edmonton that opens next Friday. I am also going to be a featured artist at Arts On Atlantic gallery here in Calgary for the month of December, with 20 of my new plein air oil paintings from this season. I will post more about those as the time gets shorter.

Enjoy!

To purchase this, or commission your own painting, please email me.

Tuesday

"Winter Backlight", watercolour landscape painting by Sharon Lynn Williams


"Winter Backlight", watercolour landscape painting, 15 x 22"
SOLD  
 
This is another of the paintings that I did at the Quiller workshop, and this one is as close to a copy as I got -Steve's was awesome, mine ok. It is done completely with transparent watercolour on 300lb watercolour paper. I have included Steve's demo below so you can see the difference. It was amazing to see how the granulating pigments worked on the rough surface.