Chatterbox

So here I am back after a long silence with Chatterbox...I started working on him while I was at the Hotel. But I just completed the painting yesterday giving it a floral and rocky background.

The background took some time...first I had thought I will leave it plain...but suddenly got this idea...and it worked exactly in line with what I had envisioned....it is detailed...and that was done on purpose as I do not plan to stick a lot of paper in there....that is the plan as of now. I did this whole painting with Golden Fluid Acrylics and defined the sharper details with a Sharpie black permanent marker.

I have not been working on Nutcraker so I will be working on these two simultaneously. Also I will be working on some small sized watercolor cards which I planned to do for first 5 people who commented on my facebook profile...I will do these cards as a part of study for my upcoming work...And also I will be making a card for Cherie Stannard who met with a terrible accident last year. To know more about her you can visit her website http://www.nelsoncreative.com/cherie

Also did some little bit sketching but not something which I would like to show now :-)...Will be taking some more time to upload those here.

The upcoming studies which I spoke about...will be Bamboos, Tiger Portrait, some more Parrots , Horse and may be a Cat. So see you guys soon with all those study cards and Nutcracker and Chatterbox. So lots of fun coming up !

Nutcracker

Medium: Collage on Wooden Ply
Size: 12" X 12"
Started working on my fourth collage...my first painting for this year...yaaay...now the interesting thing which happened is...that I ended up again with a composition in which the background and the subject are similar in color.

I am hoping that this one will be less challenging because the values are quite distinct unlike the The Cockerel. And the face of the bird is much larger too. Initially I was keeping the background flat...but then a friend suggested that why don't I make it more interesting with some foliage and mountains etc in the background...I thought let me try and it gave such depth to the paintings. I am happy that for a change now I am working with cool colors. Still not sure if I am going to keep the house red and white. Probably I will try some other colors for the house when I start pasting the papers in there. Will have to do that when I reach Milwaukee.

We are relocating to Milwaukee by the end of this week so have been working on this bird in between packing and shopping.Will have to pack some of my painting stuff separately so that I can continue to paint staying at the Hotel for two weeks. Have packed the papers and filbert brush no. 6 and glue. Still wondering if I should take another panel and acrylic colors with me....Will I have time to finish this painting and start with the next one....But anyways even if I do not take this extra stuff I am taking this drawing book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" by Betty Edwards along with my sketchbook, pencils and charcoal. One of my goals for this year is to sketch a lot....a lot( means like 3 thick sketch books :P)....I had not been doing that last year.

So my upcoming posts will be regarding the progress of Nutcracker and sketching and reading...See you guys from Milwaukee !

The Cockerel

Medium: Collage
Size: 12" X 16"
So here I am back with my finished version of the rooster collage. I learned a lot of lessons from this painting and one of them was to use a color scheme where the main subject totally stands out from background. Initially I made both the background and the face red...and so I had to play with the values and therefore made the background around the face of the rooster more yellow and lighter for the face of the rooster to stand out. Another lesson that I learned was to work on bigger sizes when the subject is something like rooster.
Then the next challenging thing was to make the grassy foreground stand out from the red walled background...somehow it was not happening and I suddenly got the new idea of making a gray pavement on the side separating the two and I am happy that it worked really well. Sometimes spontaneous ideas really work and even though there is lot of planning that we need to do in the beginning...there should always be room for new and spontaneous ideas...sometimes they may work and sometimes not...but it is important to keep trying.

Florida Sunshine

Medium: Mixed Media on Wooden Ply
Size: 24" X 12"

Just completed this one last night. Here you can see all the three sets of complementary color (green to red, orange to blue, yellow to violet). This was an experiment where the background was done in Collage with handmade and handpainted papers like the golden apples in Golden Triplets. And did the Sunflower with accent liner and glass paint. And at the end accent liner turned out to be a good way to sign the painting as well. Initially I had no idea as to how will I do the background while I was doing the rooster (which I should be completing this week) in Collage. And suddenly a thought came to mind that I could do the collage in background and I had visualized how the painting will look finally. You know sometimes we what we visualize and what finally we end up doing are not same. But here I pleasantly surprised myself by achieving what I aimed to accomplish. So the next one in the making is a rooster. You want to have a sneak peek into it. Here you go :



I should complete the neck and the grass below. Waiting to receive the handmade papers from Judy who makes beautiful chunky handmade papers. And the best thing about her is that she makes the colors and values the way I want them.
So see you all in the next post with my completed Rooster painting and you all could probably help me in naming the painting. Something out of the box....I am just not able to do it.

Golden Triplets

Medium: Collage on Wooden Board
Size : 12" X 12"

I did this collage at a workshop in Amelia Island with Elizabeth St. Hilare Nelson.The three days at the workshop were real fun. The main reason why i like this style of art is because of impressionistic look it has.
In Elizabeth's class the first exercise everyone does is to make an apple. And i am glad that i did one with three of those :). It gave me an opportunity to learn and master the technique.
Here we first color different types of papers...like handmade, maps, book papers, music sheets, newspapers etc..basically any kind of paper which we think we want to use. Then we make a pencil sketch on a wooden board and lay the basic color values and then glue the torn pieces of paper on it keeping the values in mind. And keeping the values right is the real challenge.
Thanks a lot to Elizabeth...my art instructor and a great friend. She made sure that all of us get our basics right. I fell in love with her work when i saw it for the very first time.