Back To The Dance

Hello!

It's been a while! Even though my plan was to blog once a week, even the best laid plans of we artsy types fall down in a creative slump. But with the coming of spring-like weather, it seems my slump is disappearing like a slow melting snowdrift.

To mark my return to the easel, I wanted to share the process of this painting. Appropriately called 'Back To The Dance' to celebrate breaking out of this weird creative block I've found myself in.

Back To The Dance - 20 x 24 Acrylic Mixed Media On Canvas

This painting started out as a coverup of a failed painting and was going to be a foray into abstract. It had some textural areas applied earlier with modelling paste and was painted over with a ballerina pink (yes pink?!?!). Somehow the concept of an abstract morphed into a familiar bouquet of flowers.

I do love painting flowers!

The rest they say is history, as this painting emerged through several layers of color, pastel, graphite and oil pastel. So I thought you'd be interested in seeing the process from there to here.

Beginning. You can still see the pink underpainting showing through.

As I proceed, I love to use lots of other media - graphite and pastel to add a little zing and pizazz. It might get covered up with the next layer, but that's the fun - to see if I can make it part of the finished painting. In the following closeups of parts of the painting, you can see where I used different media to make marks and the original textural elements are evident.

Background decision - Go light? Go Dark? Seems Dark won as you can see by the finished painting. I mixed up a smokey dark green and violet and laid it on the background. I used white to lighten the bottom area.

More pastel, graphite and oil pastel need to be added.

I then adusted the dark background, added some drips and some final marks with white and black graphite, more chalk pastel and more oil pastel.

As always, I like to let my paintings sit for a few days. I set them in the living room so I can look at them on and off. Often times, I will make further adjustments.

But for now, I'm just happy to be back to the dance!