Puerto Vallarta Coastline

This is a painting from a photo I took in Puerto Vallarta about 20 years ago and I've painted these cliffs before using transparent watercolor. This one is done with gouache. For my non-artist friends, gouache is opaque watercolor. I haven't painted with gouache since my 2D design class back in college which was a few years (uh, decades) ago. I wasn't crazy about it then because when I used it in large areas it was streaky and chalky looking. Now, I really like that chalky look but refer to it as being a velvety, matte finish. That sounds much nicer, don't you think? The gouache was really fun to paint with and a much more relaxing experience than when I use the transparent watercolors because areas can be covered with additional paint if I want to change anything. I can't wait to use it again. So many mediums, so little time.

Puerto Vallarta Coastline
Image Size 7" x 7"
Gouache on gessoed wood
Unframed - sides are painted - can be hung w/o frame
$100.00

Mexico Fruit Market

This month's virtual paintout location is Mexico City. I was really excited when I saw December's city because I love Mexico with it's bright colors and charming towns. It took a long time to find something I wanted to paint though. So much of what I saw looked so depressed and ugly to me and I wanted to portray Mexico in a positive way. I was excited when I found this fruit market. The actual scene was much busier so I really simplified it. I can't believe I put THREE people in this painting. This was not a fun painting for me and I'm not sure how I feel about the finished project but I'm proud that I've tackled this virtual paintout challenge for 3 months now. I wonder where January will take us.....

Mexico Fruit Market

Image Size 11" x 14"

Oil
Unframed
$100.00

Silk Clivias - Silk Painting

Aaahhh...I'm back to silk painting. I haven't painted on silk since August. Silk painting is like a drug and if I go too long without doing it, I start having withdrawal symptoms. I'm making up for the hiatus this week. So far, I've finished this one, painted two freeform scarves 14" x 72" and have put the resist on another silk that is the same size as this one.

My intention when I started this painting was to do a background that had leaves painted without resist so that they would be fuzzy and give a sense of foreground and background but after painting the flowers and leaves I felt that giving it a plain black background would give it a dramatic, more graphic quality. Once I had that in my mind, I knew that if I tried to do the dimensional looking background I would probably mess it up because my heart wasn't into it any longer. I was also afraid to use the black because my resist lines on this were really thin because my bottle of resist was almost gone and it was a little thicker than usual and I used a really small tip to apply it. Usually that means that I'm going to have lots of places where the resist didn't fully penetrate the fabric and the dyes will break through. The scarf would have been ruined if the black broke into the yellow flowers. Also, sometimes when steaming the silk after it's painted, the dyes migrate to places where they shouldn't be. I was lucky neither of those things happened and I'm very happy with the finished piece. This can be worn as a scarf but I like to frame the square silks because I have so much labor into them and they look really good hanging on the wall. Some of the tactile beauty of the silk is lost behind the glass but I use the glass because I want them to be protected.

Silk Clivias

Image Size 21" x 21"

Silk dyes on silk

Unframed
$425.00

Pink Bracts

This was such a fun painting to do. The surface is Aquabord, made by Ampersand. A few weeks ago, I finished a painting on Claybord, also by Ampersand which was really hard to work on. After finishing it, I discovered that it isn't a surface meant for watercolor. Well, no wonder I had so much trouble! I still had to use a different style of painting on this because the paint sits on the surface and easily lifts so when adding the darker values I had to be careful but since I knew that when I started, I had a different mindset going into it. It was fun to be able to completely lift out color and I love the brilliance of the painting compared to paintings on paper. It doesn't really show in this photo but this really has a glow to it. I do love vivid color!

Image size 5" x 5"

Watercolor on Aquabord

Unframed
$100.00