Healing Canvas

18cm x 24cm acrylic on canvas

The weekend has been filled with lots of anger and bad feelings and I had to get all this out of my system. So I took a canvas, covered it with red paint and then wrote down all the feelings I had. I let got and it felt so good. Then I started painting without a plan. Just adding colours and shapes and this is how it looks now. I really like it. It is the complete opposite to the feelings that are written down beneath it.

And some progress here:
Same colours as the canvas above. Waving "Hello" to the subconcious...

Another exercise in acrylics

Did this exercise last night. It is about variations in shape and it was very interesting to see it evolve. No matter where you look at the shapes lead your eyes back to the center. No way to focus an outer area longer, cause the eye always wanders back. I love that. The exercises from this book seem to be very simple, but I really learned a lot so far. And I learn how the paint reacts and how the brushes work. I knew I would love painting with acrylics, but I love it even more with every little exercise I make. I hope I can translate some of it into fabric work.

Busy busy

Yesterday I did some more exercises for acrylic painting and as I always tend to put way too much paint on my palette, I thought I could use those leftover paint for painting some small pieces of fabric. So here are my very first pieces of painted cotton canvas.

This is a new piece I am working on. The green background is just a test. The colours are quite awful on this photo. The smaller red piece is red not pink in reality and the greens are different as well. I need a new tripod for my camera to be able to take better pictures. Maybe tomorrow...

And these are a few more exercises in acrylic painting. It is a lot of fun to paint with acrylics and I enjoy learning something new with every piece.

Needlecase handstitched

I created this needlecase from a leftover piece of the underwater quiltlet a few posts ago.
It was fun stitching, although some of the fabrics were very strenious on my hands cause the scraps were all fused to a batting and in some areas it was almost impossible to get the needle through all the layers. But now it is done and I am glad it is all handstitched.

I´m stuck with my Phantasia piece cause I am not sure if I should stop or add more stitching. So I put it aside for a few days and hope I will find the answer soon.
Will start on a new piece today ...

And this is another try on acrylics. I like the colours but am not sure if I will add a bit more black to get more contrast.

Flames and start on BJP

This is an acrylic painting on paper. It is inspired by a workshop in book-form and although I like the colour combinations I am not happy with the area in the back. But I learned a few things here and I will give it another try. Painting a fire with so much snow outside is feeling sooo gooood...

And I started beading on my BJP piece for January. I changed my mind about the size and will be making them all 20cm x 20cm. The background is done on the embellisher with various wool fibers.

Doodle Book

Finally I managed to make this book look a bit more fun. I started doodling in this book a while back and always wanted to create a colourful cover. Now this is inspired by Tracy Bautista´s book "Collage Unleashed". There are so many fun ideas in it how to make your own papers and she even incorporates fabric in her work.
Background is painted with gesso and acrylics, then I drew those doodles on it with a pit pen and the "Doodle"-writing is on a scrap piece of linen. All attached to each other with gel medium.

Fiber Arts/Mixed Media announced a january challenge I can´t resist.

>>>> Pick one of your ugly, or plain, or "why did I ever buy that" commercial fabrics, and enhance it with fabric paint so that you end up liking it! Paint over it completely, outline or color in the shapes, give it an all-over tint, etc. <<<<  

Does that sound like fun or what? Oh my, another monthly challenge for 2010...

Zen 2

Zen 2
25cm x 25cm / 10"x10", Acrylics on paper

Next acrylic painting in the Zen-series. It is a bit too dark, but the more I look at it, the more I like it.

Acrylics Zen1

Zen 1
Acrylics on paper 30cm x 42cm / 12"x16"

Something I am hoping to get to do more often is painting with acrylics. I like the japanese style of being very minimalistic and hope to find my own style by creating simple pieces without too much planning and thinking.
What looks like a mirror in the upper right corner is silver acrylics paint. It was a first try and it is funny to work with cause it has a strange consistency.

Acrylics and painting - a new obsession?

I joined a class for free painting and on our first evening we did some interesting things with lots of water and paint and even more water. The pieces I did that evening are still in the class room cause they were still wet when we went home and I forgot to take my camera. But for a few days now I am working on this piece at home. It is acrylic paint on paper and lots of water here and there and everywhere. It takes very long to dry cause the paint is really thick in some areas. So I can only add a few more "running lines" every day. I like the way it changes slowly and I like adding and adding. Will stick to yellow, red and blue and see how it looks in a few more days. Maybe in the end I might add some black.

Finally - a finished piece in faux encaustic

Oh my, this was a nightmare. Really! I was not able to find the workable fixative necessary for the faux encaustic workshop anywhere in this big city of Berlin! Sometimes I really wish I would live in the USA! I´ve been to so many craft and art supply stores and none of them carried this fixative. Finally, after weeks I found one by Lascaux, a swiss brand, in a shop that just had opened up.
Now on my way I ruined one canvas cause I tried a fixative that would "definitely work", as the lady in the shop told me. Well, it didn´t and all got smeared!
The next canvas was ruined as I tried a mixture of Golden GAC 500 and Golden Airbrush Extender Medium. This mixture works pretty well as a fixative, but the spray bottle I had produced big blobs instead of a nice even coating. So part of the canvas was sealed, part wasn´t. So I got parts that were smeared, too.
Third canvas got ugly somehow and so I only finished one canvas. As you can see it is a different one from the first set. Don´t ask! This whole project almost drove me crazy, because of thousands of problems arising on the way.
BUT, the workshop itself is very very good and I highly recommend it if you would like to learn this technique. Jodi created wonderful videos and it was easy to follow them. But if you don´t live in the US, make sure you find all the stuff you need before starting the workshop...