Music Hall...Playing on a Mixed Media Theme

Music Hall 16 x 20 inches

Acrylic, Watercolours, and Colored Pencils on watercolor board

This painting is another entry in my ongoing play with different media, in this case using acrylic paints and clear gels, watercolours and some colored pencils. 

I got the idea for this violinist from an old 1920s family photo. Apparently this ancestress played the fiddle in a band in the 1920s. I had another photo of her in this glam dress from the same era. So I took yet another photo of an un-related girl playing her fiddle.....and combined them all together.....taking great liberties with the features and background. I envisioned the young lady playing her fiddle in a 1920s era “music hall” or pub. 

My other motivation for this painting was to play with a technique I discovered a while back. I wanted to do a mullioned stained glass window......but without having to do all that pesky lead work for the design. So I started out taping off my window and glazing it with a couple of watercolour washes to show the evening lights coming thru the stained glass....

After the watercolour was totally dry, I laided a plastic stencil over the watercolour wash and brushed a clear acrylic glaze over the entire wash area.....

You can see here how the clear acrylic glaze seals the watercolour wash under the “glass” pieces.....but NOT where the stencil covered what will be the leaded strips.

Then I took some watercolor darks....browns, blacks, blues......and washed them OVER the entire window square, excluding the music hall lettering. The watercolours sank into the un-glazed portions of the window leading.....but was easily wiped off from the clear acrylic glazed window panes! Instant window leading.

I continued with the rest of the painting, using watercolors, coloured pencils and some acrylics. I used watercolours where I wanted an “organic” graduated wash, like the dress silhouette and the wall. I used coloured pencils for the violin, window sash and lettering since I needed the preciseness of the pencil tips. I finally used acrylics for her arms and face and for texture in the wall.

And this is the outcome.......hung on a wall in an art show.