Re painting a Rainbow

After looking at and thinking about the Piece of the Rainbow painting I posted about previously I decided to give it another try. My original idea was to make it 1' wide but I had compromised on 6" wide because I had a board that wide already. So naturally my muse didn't appreciate the compromise and has been hounding me to make it like I'd imagined it. (I've been waking up at 4:30 am this week). So I went to the local lumber yard and got the right material and here's the result!

I like it better, much more impact for the room I think. And now maybe I'll sleep better.

A funny story related to this piece too. I had the lumber yard saw an 8' x 4 ' board into 3 lengths, 2 that were 1' wide and the left over 2' wide piece, all of them still 8' long. My plan was to stick them in my trunk (2007 Dodge Stratus), tie it all down and hope for the best. Well,I thought my trunk was a little deeper than it actually was. I probably had 5 1/2' of each board sticking out and bending over the trunk lip with the tips bouncing about 1' off the pavement. But what could I do? I had to get them home and Lisa was at work with the Explorer. So I tied the trunk down around it, tied a flag onto it all and headed home. I took the back roads and thought I'd made it when I got home and they looked to be the same as I'd left them. But on closer inspection there were only 2 of the 3 boards there. One of the narrow ones was gone! So I pulled out the remaining 2,  grabbed my battery powered saw and got my daughter, Chyanne,  to drive me back over the route I'd taken home. We soon found it and I sawed about 2.5 feet off right there in the street by the curb! Then it all fit in the back seat! 

The funniest part is that at home when making such a cut I measure it and mark it to make sure I get it straight and even and still mess it up plenty of times, but out there with the board laying against the curb, in the dark, with traffic going by, and no measuring or marking what so ever, I made a dead on straight right angle cut! My muse was helping me out I guess since it was also the perfect length and I used it for the painting without doing anything else to it!

More inspiration.

Driving home the other day I saw a pretty little rainbow and that got me thinking about capturing a little of that beauty for my house. I wanted something that would make a dramatic impact, so fairly large. I hit on the idea of making it long and narrow. I figured about 1' wide by perhaps 5'-6' tall. When I went looking through my pile of boards for suitable ones to make the frame there were none, but there were some nice old 6' tall fence boards about 6" wide. I decided to use those. I cleaned and sanded 2 of them off and covered them with canvas. Primed it then painted the rainbow you see in these pictures. A little narrower than I really wanted but I still think if makes a nice impact in our red painted bedroom, it's 5.5' tall  by 6" wide. Here's 2 a picture with 2 views of it and one of what it looks like on the wall. Kind of cool and now anyone who sleeps in that room can contemplate the beauty of a rainbow before they drop off to sleep and perhaps even dream of rainbows.

By the way my memory device for the colors of a rainbow is ROY G BIV (red, orange,yellow,green,blue,indigo and violet). 

The latest abstraction

My wife liked my blue globe paintings but said she was always partial to reds and yellows, warm colors instead of cold, so that lead me (inspired) to try a red and yellow based spheres abstraction. And here's the result.

The thing is it's likely to get repainted because while I'm not unhappy with it I'm not happy with it either. I think I can do better. The blue spheres worked better because I purposely painted a light blue background and a dark blue background in order to show off the spheres, which are actually painted the exact same colors on each background. For this one I wasn't planning on a contrasting piece and so I failed to get the background right. It's basically a mid-tone color that by itself is very pleasing, but it fails to show off the sphere's! They are basically the same tones and look stuck on to me. Not enough drama in their modeling. So I'll probably paint over it and go with a darker background then repaint the spheres. But I may try putting a yellow corona around the sphere's first to see if that pops them off the page. It may, but if not I'll happily grab my sponge and some paint and got to town on it! But that's the nature of the art process. If everything came out exactly as you planned you wouldn't grow much as an artist, the creative struggle is where the real interest lies!

Crayola abstracts

A couple of simple abstracts done with good old Crayola crayons, really a great portable, fairly clean art medium. Pretty fun to use too.

New work from this weekend

In between a lot of driving around the southern half of California this last weekend, a 5 day weekend for me, I managed to get in some painting. I've been wanting to explore using only blue, with a  little white, in a couple of abstracts. So I painted these two pieces. The blue spheres are painted the exact same way but they were placed of different backgrounds which, as you can see, drastically effects the way the globes look.

Here's a couple of pictures that show the details of the paintings so you can see how they look. I put 4 different colors of blue and some white on a piece of cardboard and I'd dab the brush into the the paint, getting darker or lighter blues on the brush based on what part of the globe I was painting. Then I'd just dab the brush straight onto the spheres and let the colors mix or not as they pleased, there are some very interesting little details resulting from this method. I did have to wipe the brush off every now and then when the colors got to blended. I wanted them only a little mixed.

They look especially good when combined together into a dual painting.

Abstraction on the go

One of the cool things about painting abstracts is that so much of the development of an idea is inside your head! Meaning you can think about ideas and how to paint them anywhere and anytime. You can do it with regular paintings, but you often have to do a lot of drawing to work out ideas. I still draw for abstracts but I can do a lot of the planning while riding in a car. It's pretty cool and makes a long trip go easier.

In progress

Here's a couple of phone cam pics of the blue paintings in progress.

And here's what my left hand looks like so far today, even after many washings!