"Winter Tulips", oil painting from life by Sharon Lynn Williams

"Winter Tulips", oil painting, 6x6"
This is my first attempt at those flowers I bought yesterday. These ones came in a pot; that way I figured I would get several tries at them before they died. This was really hard! Again I had them set up next to my window, so had only l hour maximum. Lots of reflected light and cast shadows, plus the translucency of the petals, with the back petals showing through. I have never done a tulip painting in oil from life before -a photo makes things much easier. I didn't exactly nail it this time, but think it is kind of nice anyway.

Enjoy!

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

"Should We Follow?", oil painting from life

"Should We Follow?", 6x8", oil on board
SOLD  
 
I set these pears up on my kitchen table with the sun coming in through the big windows, figuring that I only had 1 hour to get it before the shadows changed too much. I am finding it really difficult to take good photos of wet oils inside my studio, however you get the gist of things.
This was really fun to do, so I went out and bought tulips and daffodils to paint over the weekend while my DH is away on his ski trip.

Enjoy!

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

"Light Loves Colour", studio oil painting

"Light Loves Colour", 6x6" oil on board
SOLD

I had some paint left on my palette after hitting "Summit Lake" one more time (it's never over until it's over!) so thought I would try a still life from some photo references I had. Each of these elements are from different photos, so I kind of made it up -would have really liked to have seen the actual bottom of that brown bottle! It was fun to imagine what the reflected light would have looked like if they had been together. I haven't done any still life since Carol's workshop, but think I will try to set up some still life staging gizmo in the studio, at least until the weather cooperates for plein air.
I am having a battle with myself over originality -it seems like everyone and his brother are painting small still lives, so I really don't feel the need to add to the pile. However, it does sharpen your observation and alla prima (= in one sitting) oil painting, so it is useful. I just have to find MY way of doing it that will set it apart from all the others...

Enjoy!

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

Studio Oil painting -finished?

"Summit Lake Revisited", oil on canvas, 18 x 24"
I spent a few hours today getting this painting this far. I think it may be finished -what do you think? I believe I captured the essence of the original plein air painting- you can see it here. I loved the originals snow reflections, but I like this mountain better. I took some advice I found on the net to just use larger brushes when trying to work up a larger studio oil from a plein air painting -I think that was very good advice!

I also received my first blog award -at least the first one that I didn't have to jump through hoops to receive :) -from my friend and wonderful artist and writer Veronica Funk. She gave it to me with no strings attached (bless her) but on further research I see that I am supposed to direct you to 12 other artists' blogs that I love. Now I do have a very limited number of artists that this blog is linked to, which you can see on the right side of my blog, so I will endeavor to chose some new ones (these aren't in any order!) I just went through my favorites and pulled out some that I haven't been to in awhile -big mistake time-wise, but fun none the less.
1. Ingrid Christenson -loose oil painter and friend
2. Jane Rosemont - a wonderful photographer and long distance friend
3. Marc Hanson -a great plein air painter and very giving teacher -check him out to learn tons
4. Crystal Neubauer -neat 3D and mixed media stuff
5. Dominik Modlinski -this is his website, he is my plein air hero traveling to very remote areas to paint
6. Martha Lever -I took an online calligra-fun workshop from Martha, and she was in my digital manipulations class too -does fun work with journals and text
7. Annelein Beukenkamp -fabulous watercolours
8. Plein Air Artists -a ning group I just found -too many great artists here to list separately, but check out the site (that's where I read the suggestion about upsizing a PA ptg)
9. Marie Fox -oil painter -paints with a number of other fantastic artists who are linked on her site
10. And this is the last one (have to get back to painting) Elizabeth Golden -mixed media artist with lots of free give-away vintage images
Wow, that was a very eclectic grouping wasn't it.

Enjoy!

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

Back again!

I am back from visiting my kids in Ontario for a week. I now have 3 of my 4 children living in my home province, and I miss them all like crazy. When I got back I received an email from my cyberfriend and fellow artist Carol Nelson, which contained this amazing painting she did of me from my bio photo. Carol has embarked on an incredible journey, committing herself to doing 100 portraits in 100 days, and posting them on her blog. I hope you will check out her site -she does geologic abstracts and florals mostly, so this project has been a real learning experience for her. Setting up AND maintaining a blog really pushes one to excel in painting -now I had better get back to my own easel!

Mixed Media Demonstration -cont.

Ok, so after I had gotten to the last step of the mixed media demo from Jan 27th, I spent several hours playing with it, trying to make it work, but it was going from bad to worse! I got frustrated with it and decided to gesso it over and give it another try -kind of a catharsis. I put 2 layers of gesso on it and then a layer of gloss medium to seal the surface. Then I thought I would stamp into the gesso with my large, dry stamp, and behold the gesso was not quite dry so it left a cool imprint in it. You can see above where the stamp actually grazed into the underlying color a bit (the shine is the gloss medium, so you can see where it got removed with my stamp)

So I was re-energized to begin again and see how the new imprints would take the paint. I used the same colours as before (Quin gold, Quin crimson and Ultramarine blue) and popped them in and mixed them around. You can see how the gesso takes the paint differently(it is semi-absorbant) than the gloss medium (non-absorbant); as well, the paint kind of settled into the indentations. I did a little more stamping as well at this stage, mostly with the small spiral stamp.

Next I took a viewfinder design and began to block out some of the shapes with darker paint. At this point I could see the suggestion of where a figure could be (the breast shape on center right side and a butt-cheek and legs in the lower part of the painting. I had no idea where the head would be or what her upper torso was doing. I spent another several hours trying to get her to work -but alas, that wasn't working out either. So desperation hit yet again (heavy sigh) and I took my rubbing alcohol and poured it all over the painting and took my wet sandpaper and scrubbed at the mess until all I had was a ghost of the former paint. This left a very cool texture again, because I had applied the gesso layers with a foam roller, which left a bumpy texture, so the paint lifted off the high bits and remained in the valleys. If you zoom into the painting below, you can see some of that texture.

This time I took and put in some more dark passages, and decided to keep it abstract-no more figure finding for me right now! I painted through a stencil in varying ways to keep the texture moving from the lower right to the upper left -light against dark and then dark against light. Repetition with variation, remember? Then I began to add different colour opaques to it, breaking up shapes and joining others. I was once again having fun!

More dark pattern to link the the elements of the painting together. I think this is the final painting -at least for now!

Moral of this lesson: It's never over 'til it's over -gotta love acrylics...

Enjoy!

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

New Studio Oil Painting

I know I have been a bad blogger as I haven't posted in a whole week or more -but life has been wonderfully busy. I haven't been painting much lately, and that has been in acrylics. However, I thought I would post an oil that I started this weekend. It is a 18x24" canvas done from my plein air painting "Summit Lake", painted this year at Waterton Provincial Park. When I do oils in my studio, which is not often, I love to work from a plein air study in conjunction with photos to make the larger work. Trying to keep the looseness and spontaneity is the hard part here. As you can see I am working on a red-orange toned board, the same colour as most of my plein air work is done on. This is pretty much just past the block-in stage. I am leaving the water and reflections for now as they have to be done wet-on-wet in one go. That is where the painting will either make it or fail -so I am a little anxious about it :)

Enjoy!

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

Mixed Media demonstration -part 2

Here I am still at the make shapes and values stage. I have added a thin very dark glaze of acrylic, and while it is still wet, I spritz some rubbing alcohol with my handy Chloraseptic bottle (gives spotty spray rather than a fine mist). The rubbing alcohol pushes the dark glaze aside, revealing donut shapes of the lighter under glaze. I also stamped into this glaze with a dry stamp. I have also eliminated any distracting white shapes near the edges of the paper with transparent glazes.

Now I am working upright sometimes, so that I can get back and see what is happenind -trying to remember to get the big shapes right. I have glazed over various parts of the painting with transparent glazes of colour to give a wonderful glow and to link areas together, thereby creating larger shapes. You can still see some of my chalk outlines, which I have now changed since I first put them on. I am trying to play with the illusion of depth, making some of the boxes appear to be in front of others. It's fun to play with depth in an abstract painting, and to flatten the perspective in a realistic one!

Here I have removed the chalk outlines. This is it for the darks, for right now anyway. Up to now I have only been working with transparent layers.

This is the way it was left at the end of class. While working on it I have rotated it around many times and worked in that new orientation for a while, trying to keep my options open. Bad to fall in love too early! At this stage I have begun to add opaque lights into the painting. I am still just using the colours I began with, only this time they are added to gesso (my easy white) to make opaque layers. I have put some on translucently (thined with a bit of water) so that I could do my alcohol trick(see the light blue shape on the upper right edge) -repetition with variation, the key to a successful painting. Light against dark/dark against light. I applied some of the opaques through stencils to create new interesting textures. I really hated to leave it at this stage as I felt it was really beginning to come together. I will try to work on it this week to bring it to a finish -or maybe I will wait and do that so the class can watch next Monday. And thanks to Lindsay for providing the photos :)

Stay tuned for part 3... to come!

New Mixed Media demonstration -part 1

This is the end of the first step of the demo that I did on Monday for my Mixed media class. The objective was to make a 'start' using fluid acrylics, stamps and stencils, and then working our way to a finished abstract painting. I began this painting by squeezing Quin Gold, Quin Crimson and Ultramarine blue from the bottles in squirts around the gloss medium coated Aquarius paper, then squirts of Acrylic Glazing Liquid were added on top. Then a scraper was used to squeegie this around the page a bit to make some wonderful stained areas-these are the brilliant colour areas. Very cool as you get very unexpected patterns. The excess was then scraped off, drawn through and played with. Dry stamps were pressed into the wet paint areas to lift the paint, paint was added to stamps and stamped for a positive image, and a rubber shapper was used to draw lines back to the white of the coated paper. Sure enough, we have chaos here, but I have lots of textures and colours to work with.

Here I am hard at work -remember to wash off your scraper between scrapings or else you will end up with mud. I save most of the scrapped paint to use as darks later on. This stage is all about texture and colour.

While the first stage is still wet, I go back with my scraper and begin to define some geometric shapes. I am looking to get a flow between organic shapes in the foreground and geometric shapes in the background.

At this stage I have drawn some shapes with white chalk to suggest a direction I might like to go in. Of course, all this is subject to change as you shall see. I begin to place in some darks to define some of the geometric shapes. I also lift with some rubbing alcohol to get some white paper back. That is the beauty of working on a sealed surface! This stage is all about adding shape and value to the colour and texture we got on step one.

Stay tuned tomorrow for part 2!

More altered book

This really IS a spread by Cheryl! She took off on the image of the bird on the left page, then painted the right hand text page, leaving a section of text about birds, and highlighted blue-paint-blue-Bird from that. Then she cut a window out of that page and inserted a coregated cardboard tag to which she attached some wool. When you pull on the tag, it reveals...
the birds nest! Now how cool is that!

This is my favorite spread done by Lindsay. She took off on the photo of the kangaroo on the right page and made her own page using collage papers cut into neat shapes. Then she painted the boy and dog on separate cardstock, and attached them to the piece of card that says her word JUMP. When you pull up on that tab, the boy and dog rise up on the page! Then to top it off, she has a bit of text above the kangaroo saying "Ummm..not bad for beginners". What a hoot. This really has been the most remarkable project.

I have been asked why I am not posting any paintings lately. The answer is simple, I haven't been doing any! I have been learning photoshop (HUGE!) and how to digitally manipulate images (even huger -is that even a word?) , which I hope will help in my collage and more abstract work. One of my students took some step-by-step photos of a demo I did for my mixed media class, which I shall post soon. Life seems to be extremely busy for me right now, but hopefully things will settle down soon. I still have to read half the library books I posted earlier -sigh -so much to do, so little time.

Enjoy!

For more information on this project, feel free to email me!