Thursday, May 29, 2014

Spring flowers

To be in tone with the season, and because I did not play with paint in a while, I decided to make myself a paper garden. I used acrylic paint, acrylic ink, collage and watercolors and varied the way I applied them on the mat board.

For the first one, I used alcohol drops to create round shapes for the flowers: 


Here, I gessoed over the first attempt and applied fluid acrylics, some collage on the vase and white ink splatters.

For the third one, I used acrylic ink and a straw to mix the colors and create interesting areas for the leaves and flowers.

 Here I used watercolor washes. The colors appear a bit washed out in the scanned version. I applied workable fixative after the watercolor dried to be able to add more color on top without the watercolor lifting. The board was primed with soft gel. I might darken the colors on this one a bit. Oh, I also used salt and that lightened the colors a lot.