20210213: Amethyst and Grey Shape Study

13/28 of Paint Yourself Happy. Got a late start and then got called away in the middle, twice, but I finally finished it! Amethyst Genuine and Payne’s grey are two of my favorite paints to work with, but I’ve never used them together. I decided to see how they interacted. My favorite part of the piece is the middle shot of detail, which is the first time I’ve ever gone back and re-worked a part to make it closer to what I’d envisioned. In this case, I learned to add “highlight” by going back and scrubbing out some of the paint that had settled too darkly. This piece isn’t perfect, but I learned a ton doing it, and I find it soothing to both work on and look at after the fact.

Paints:

• Daniel Smith Amethyst Genuine
  Holbein Payne’s grey

20210212: Magenta and Yellow Shape Study

12/28 of the Paint Yourself Happy challenge: I took some of the patterns from my last piece and experimented with applying them to a bichromatic palette. I like this for completely different reasons!
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This was my first time using another new paint, quinophthalone yellow. It’s quite thick. Doesn’t like to spread much, or share the paper. It makes for a bold bottom layer and I am here for it.

Daniel Smith watercolors:

• quinacridone magenta

• quinophthalone yellow

20210212: Magenta Shape Study

Doing some PYH homework. I’m pretty happy with how this turned out. I started with the squares, and can definitely tell where I loosened my grip and made myself breathe. Think it was somewhere early into the triangles. This is one of my two newest colors, and I am in love after having seen somebody else use it in this challenge. I simply had to have it. Gonna try one of these with another color and see where that takes me.

Paint: Daniel Smith quinacridone magenta

20210211: The Island

After having gotten back home to my regular setup, I decided to take another swing at the variation on “Tiny Landscapes” mono printing exercise. Having a clear, rigid, acrylic sheet to work with worked a lot better for me than using the back side of a cottage cheese container lid that I’d been improvising with while at my folks’ house.

This one reminds me of an aerial view of an island, with snowy peaks and snow runoff into the sea.

20210210: Green Triangles and Circles

I mixed some indigo into hooker’s green to get kind of a fir green color. The triangles started out pretty horribly, so I just decided to add more 😂. Initially I’d planned on having them all be discrete layers, but I got hasty and the smaller ones started to bleed into others, so I just went with it. I decided to spice up the circles by using a small flat brush to add spatter, which if you think about it is pretty much just tiny circles. This exercise was really fun!

Paint:

• Daniel Smith Hooker’s Green

• Da Vinci Indigo

20210209: Bad Pineapple

My brain started rebelling against all of the repeating pattern assignments and so I just threw this down. I love looking at it.

Violet:

• Daniel Smith ultramarine blue

• M. Graham alizarin crimson

• M. Graham ultramarine violet

Yellow:

• Daniel Smith hansa yellow light

20210209: Indigo Squares

The Paint Yourself Happy team gave us the assignment of choosing a pattern or shape and repeating it over and over again. I’m really glad I finished it, just so that I didn’t have to do it anymore. I never want to see another square again.

20210203: Cloud Gazing

As part of the Paint Yourself Happy assignment of creating tiny landscapes, I grabbed two random colors from the box:

• M Graham quinacridone red

• Daniel Smith iridescent gold

I had no idea what to do with them. I don’t particularly like painting landscapes at this point. And red and gold don’t exactly lend themselves to traditional landscapes. So I just painted a swipe of color on, and then another, and then just…kept going. It wasn’t until I was about 70% done with it that I knew what it was going to be.

This was a lot of fun. Might do it again sometime.