Skip to main content

Art Day

In my attempt to improve my painting skills, I discovered that I was washing quite a bit of paint down the drain after a session of making a mess on a piece of canvas. I decided to start using the left-over paint on canvas swatches—4x4—and I've discovered I usually like the scrap bits better than the original piece I set out to create to begin with.

After painting something that left me with pinks, white, and oranges, this is what the throw-away paint gave me:

After a pathetic attempt to paint the head of a tabby cat on a bright green background, here is what I was able to make before washing out the brushes and wiping the pallet clean:

and after a simple landscape, one I actually liked in the end, here is what the left-over paint gave me:

Here's to not wasting paint, which isn't cheap, by the way. And here's to learning to paint something other than cypress trees.

Comments

Shazza said…
You sure look like you're having fun with this!

Check out this blog, her paintings are fun and yours remind me of hers: http://karinjurick.blogspot.com/
MmeBenaut said…
Robyn, my favourite is centre left. This one is worthy of hanging. I see a budding van Gogh in the making:)
Hi Robyn,
Very appropriate effort during Earth week!

Caleb just puts waxed paper over his palette and puts it in the freezer. Paint seems to keep indefinitely.

Colorado Susan
dive said…
What a great way to use up scrap paint, Robyn!
I love the splash of orange on the first pink one.
Both the middle ones are fabulous; I especially like the way you have captured the fading colours in the distance on the left hand one.
The bottom ones look like English oaks, which I find a real pig to paint. I like the earthy ground colour on the second one.
Excellent stuff! You are really creating your own style very quickly.
Great idea using the swatches Robyn. I'm all for recycling and inthe name of art, even better.
he he i like the bottom tree on the left - you've left some space in letting the sky poke through.
Alifan said…
Wow Robyn you are creative.... like them......

Popular posts from this blog

No More Mr. Nice Guy

It's good to be a nice person--to say nice things, to do nice things, to write nice things--but I declare an end to the use of the word nice. Nice is what you say when you can't think of any other adjective. Someone shows you a picture of their back yard--that's nice. Someone tells you about their afternoon adventure--that's nice. Or someone describes their childhood in great detail and sometimes with painstaking effort--that's nice. It's a lazy word, and it's non-descriptive. Nice is like mashed potatoes with noodles and chicken gravy all in a big pile on one plate with some canned corn for garnish. Everything is the same color and texture and base substance--starch (this is a favorite Amish dish). Nice is like a partly cloudy day in April when outside feels like inside, and you can't tell a difference between the lighting and the temperature of your living room and the lighting and temperature of your front yard. Nice is a glass of lukewarm water. ...

Long Live Anita Bowser

You know I occasionally check my hometown newspaper's website to scan the obituaries (morbid, I know, but I'm at that age). Over this past weekend, I read the obituary of Indiana State Senator Anita Bowser . She was a noted Democrat who championed causes protecting the neediest in the state's population. She was respected on both sides of the aisle for her intelligence and plain and outspoken approach to law making. The picture on her senate page is lovely. I remember none of those things about Anita Bowser . My first year or so in college was spent at a branch of Purdue University, and in the early 80s, Anita was a political science professor. She taught my American Government class my freshman year, and she was a mess. Somewhere in my old text book, I have a sketch of her drawn on a particularly dull day in class--her hose sagged at her ankles, her slip showed at least half an inch all the way around, her hair had been slept on but not brushed, and her bright red lip stic...

My Sitemeter is All Bloated and Not Quite Itself

I'm tempted to let it sit on the couch with its feet curled up under a blanket, a hot cup of coffee in hand, a block of cherry almond bark Chocolove within reach, and An Affair to Remember spinning in the DVD player. I'm one of those obsessive bloggers, the kind who checks her sitemeter as often as possible throughout the day, the kind who gauges the quality of her writing by the number of readers who regularly stop by. I've become less interested in the overall number of hits and more interested in the number of repeat hits. The return visitors are the ones I long for. When my sitemeter reads forty at the end of the day, and the majority of those hits are webpals who have conversed, I'm happy. Forty may seem low to many of you, but I've only been at this since August. To me, forty is a jackpot. A few days ago, I sat down at my laptop and discovered a number somewhere in the eighties. Eighties! Yippee! Yeeha ! Hoo-rah ! I've been discovered by the webworld , o...