I finished my galah painting over the weekend and finally uploaded the photos this morning. There are so many layers of paint on it (which I hope you can see in the close-up below) that I’ll have to wait a few days for it to dry properly before varnishing it. I posted the reference photograph and sketch here last week.
P.S. This is what became of the blank canvas featured in December’s Anything can happen… post.
Sometimes the only opportunity to take photographs is from the back seat of a moving vehicle. No time to think ― just point and click. It helps if you are really quick and a little bit lucky. When you see the original shot prior to cropping (below), you could be forgiven for thinking that there was nothing much in this scene worth painting…
…but I zoomed in and used the scribble sketch to figure out my composition. I’m now painting the landscape and building up lots of lovely textures, and then I’ll have to figure out the best way to paint the cockatoo — too realistic and he won’t have the sense of fun I want to create; too abstract and no one will know he’s a bird. Wish me luck : )
I painted this little yellow rose especially for last weekend’s pop-up mini market ― it sold before it even got to the table! If the rose looks familiar, that may be because it’s based on a photograph I posted earlier in the year.
I do have a few photos of the market to show you — in my next post…
I’ve painted this magical place (although not this particular image) before. Hamurana Springs also inspired Flow (my first ever abstract), Stand (an experiment in using pastels) and Redwoods (an acrylic version of Stand). There are quite a few layers of paint on this one ― lots of colours and loads of texture. The painting looks particularly good at night with the light spilling down through the gap in the trees and reflecting on the water.
Sergei Bongart’s advice to study nature, exaggerate light and be less inhibited (the quote I posted here on Friday) is more than a little to blame for this painting which I started on Friday morning and finished off on Saturday afternoon. It is based on one of the photographs I took during our DC-3 flight over Christchurch last year.
Because I wanted to exaggerate the landscape, I decided to go with a fairly adventurous palette (inspired by, among others, the late, great Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s ‘Blobs grow in beloved gardens’ 1975 and ‘Green town’ 1978.
But where did the red hills come from? Well, the bright red is my complementary exaggeration of the dark green trees. And the sheep? That was my way of introducing a calm focal point ― something to suggest that perhaps the hills were not on fire : )
Anna Cull ~ Art & Music 