In my Studio

An Apple a Day - a commissioned piece to pair with a pear!

In my Studio

She Picks Oranges in the Evening

Purple

Purple Flower Garden
1st painting of the year
From my Gallery of Acrylic Paintings

Mouse Pad

Artist's dilemma:
Excited when my paintings sell
But a bit sad too
It's sometimes hard to let them go

This one is going to a new home today... but I decided to hold on a bit longer

I'm printing up mouse pads and you can see them in my Etsy Shop

Poppies

'Purple Poppies'
Going on display at Overlake Senior Health Care Center in Bellevue WA

Also on Etsy

In Abstract

'Glass Lake'
A painting for my Hubby

Trees

'Purple Rain'
Having fun with my Tree Series!

This one is also in my Etsy shop

The Ballerina's

Set of 4 acrylic paintings
Envisioning them in a girl's room


on etsy

Pears

 

For years, I taught art to 150 students at a local elementary school. Each year, we spent a number of classes drawing, painting, collaging... Pears and Apples. The perfect objects to study color, shape, lighting and value, and 3D rendering.

This weekend I was tinking of all of those wonderful kids and the fun we had together, so I picked up my paints and dove back into Pears

Step-by-Step Color Evolution

Come take a peek at how the color evolved in this abstract painting!

I've been having fun with abstract art - admiring the way colors dance and play off of each other. And marveling in the freedom to paint over, to alter the look and feel with just small dabs of paint here and there.

I often get asked how I pull colors together and my usual answer is to simply play, then figure out what is and what isn't working! On this painting, I started with a complementary palette of red-orange and blue-green geometric swatches and thought I would share the last few steps I took to pull the colors together:

 I liked the basic colors and design, but felt that the composition was spotty - the contrast between dark red-orange and light teal too great.

So I painted over some of the red with more teal, added some dark teal accents as well as some drips of rust to help pull the teal and red-orange together.

A bit of white here and there helped draw the eye in a circle around the painting.

 I felt that the colors worked better with each other, however still too much emphasis on the dominant red-orange.

So I painted over more of the red, softened the white with a bit of rust and added drip lines of teal to better link the squares and make the geometric aspect a bit more obscure.

'Copper Age'

Abstracts with Rust

 

Photos of Poppies and Hydrangeas are layered together with a yummy old piece of rust I found on the beach