BLUE JAR
This
blog post shows off a bit about a small acrylic 8 x 10 on stretched
canvas piece called Blue Jar. After seeing friends do series of
smallish works (8x8 inches or 8x10 inches) I decided I'd try a few. I
wanted to try a coupla ideas that I liked, but felt wouldn't rate a
full size canvas.
So's I
grabbed a two pac of inexpensive stretched canvases. The bad news is
the canvases were really thin material, compared to more expensive
duck cloth canvases I'd painted on in the past. The good news is the
canvas was indeed really thin.......so thin I could use an old
illustrator trick of transferring a drawing using a light box. In
other words, I put the cropped (both digitally in Photoshop and after
printing out....with scissors) photo I'd taken of the jar, and put it
behind the canvas. I shinned a bright light behind the canvas and
photo, and viola! I could easily trace off the main outlines of the
jar with paint. Thus getting the image transferred in one fell swoop!
Here's what the backside looked like.
So I had
the main outlines on canvas and I could start painting. Tho' the
main subject was the cobalt blue jar, I was designing things under
the “mostly, some and a bit” guideline. So's it was going to be
mostly yellow, some blue, and bits of red......i.e. A triad color
scheme.
I got this far in my first session:
I wanted
to do this piece fairly quickly and use larger brush strokes than I
usually do. My imagination had been fired by some really nice
impressionistic artwork I'd seen recently. I have to admit I was
drawn in by all the lovely reflections on the jar and found myselves
reverting to my old detailing habits. In the end, I went back in and
removed some of the excessive brushwork in the background to allow
the detailing in the jar to shine.
