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.
20210206: Purple and gold fields
There are so many (accidental) tiny landscapes in these color fields! I believe this is my new favorite thing to paint. Day 6 of the Paint Yourself Happy challenge continues.
Tried to pick “opposite”-ish colors to see if I could get them to make some unsavory blends. That didn’t work, I love them all.
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I love how I mixed the red and blue together to make a deeper violet but they still managed to separate in my mixing saucer and give me a surprising array of colors from indigo to aubergine.
Paints:
Violet: Daniel Smith ultramarine blue, M Graham alizarin crimson, M Graham ultramarine violet
Umber: M Graham burnt umber, Daniel Smith iridescent gold
20210204: Quiet Countries
Day 4 of Paint Yourself Happy. This was an interesting experiment: mono printing
take a nonporous surface and put some beads of watercolor on it
invert the surface and press it down onto paper
pick it up and see what sticks, and work with it
I tried this challenge when I was visiting my folks, and had limited access to resources. Ended up cutting the rim off of a cottage cheese container lid and using that, with questionable results. Overall, my experiments were a bust, but this one came out okay. I think I’ll try it again later when I get back to my home office and have more of my tools at hand.
Paints:
M Graham ultramarine violet deep
M Graham alizarin crimson
Daniel Smith ultramarine blue
Holbein bamboo green
M Graham phthalo blue
the tiniest smidge of Holbein’s silver, left over from the rinse water
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.
