I didn’t paint yesterday and I don’t feel guilty about that at all. I’ve been good at sticking to my painting a day. In fact some days I’ve done THREE. So today, I am going to talk about framing. I do most of my own framing. I collect shabby chic frames and also look for good prices on new frames. These two examples are not my work, but illustrate the magic of framing. There is often more than one good option. In this case one gives the piece a very nice modern feel. The other harkens back to the impressionists. Both compliment the piece nicely.

I’m having so much fun and pretty pleased with my results as well. I often feel that painting abstracts is harder than painting reality. So much can go wrong when you don’t have a “guide” to show you the way. I’ve also felt that it’s even harder to paint abstracts in watercolor than other mediums. Partially because of its innate qualities, transparency and fluidity. Also because of Acrylics innate qualities – fast drying and opaqueness. I’m sure I’ll get some arguments about this. Today’s pieces were based on photos that were abstract to an extent. I still have to tweak the “Dancing Lights” and “Night Rain” needs its misket taken off. There will probably be tweaks needed there too.

Our sumi-e group, Hisshin (Spirit of the Brush) is one of my favorite art groups. It’s a small community who simply get together to paint. Each month one of the group does a presentation to teach us how to paint a particular subject. Today it was Poinsettias and I think I did pretty well. Sumi-e has been a struggle for me, but I still enjoy it very much. I thought I’d have a leg up since I am a watercolor artist. It’s a whole different animal though. The brushes and paper behave totally differently!

No, I’m not talking about the plant. My blog is about my art. Here is the one from yesterday that I tweaked some. I did two today because I’m not sure I’ll get a chance to do any painting tomorrow – other than the Sumi-e I do every second Thursday of the Month. My favorite day of the month! I did, however, prep two pieces with some frisket just in case.

So I discovered that I was posting to the wrong page. Evidently I somehow have another WordPress site that is sharedvisionsart.wordress.com or some such. Not sure why or how.

Yesterdays piece was not completed, though you can certainly see where it was going and how it would end up. Todays piece was also not completed ( too many extraneous HAVE to’s). It’s obvious this one was “done on the fly”. I will definitely post the finalized version of this, since it is NOT as obvious how it might end up.

These are 3 more abstracts that I did the day before yesterday. I used the good old “salt technique” for one of them. I often use 3 different types of salt – kosher, regular, and popcorn. Their different size crystals create more variety in the effect. I happen to love texture, so this is one of my favorite techniques. Like most things you can over do it. My favorite of these is “We Can See Eye to Eye”. The composition turned out better than I thought it was going to, unlike “Go with the Glow”. I did, however, enjoy the process while painting it. I made a point of using my watercolor brushes the way I would use a Sumi-e brush. It was very meditative.

These are 3 more abstracts that I did the day before yesterday. I used the good old “salt technique” for one of them. I often use 3 different types of salt – kosher, regular, and popcorn. Their different size crystals create more variety in the effect. I happen to love texture, so this is one of my favorite techniques. Like most things you can over do it. My favorite of these is “We Can See Eye to Eye”. The composition turned out better than I thought it was going to, unlike “Go with the Flow”. I did, however, enjoy the process while painting it. I made a point of using my watercolor brushes the way I would use a Sumi-e brush. It was very meditative.

It’s not that I haven’t been doing art. I’ve just been doing more mixed media than painting. I miss watercolor painting in particular. So, in an effort to make it “more accessible” to me, I’ve recently spent hours, days, months going through the photos on my laptop. Now, you have to understand I have thousands of photos. In the cloud there are over 45,000. I’m not certain if all those are on my laptop (that’s the next step…way down the road). Over the past 10 years I haven’t been as organized as I use to be. I use to immediately Title any pictures I took and put them in an appropriately labelled folder. 

Here’s my standard organizational chart (feel free to steal it):

Abstract

Buildings

Cats

Fauna

Flora

People

Places

Scapes

Still

Life

Things 

Most importantly I’ve made a folder called Paintings 2B. Since it’s been so long since I picked up a watercolor brush, I started with some abstracts.

So some how my last three post weren’t actually posted to my current website. Here is one from April:

This isn’t the prettiest piece, but I’ve always liked it. It’s called “Don’t Be So Negative”. That mostly comes from the fact that I worked on making sure my focal point would contain negative space. Say Goodbye! This is being disassemble. I will reuse the substrate and some of the bits within it. No one can keep EVERYTHING they create. Sometimes the decision to destroy is easier than others.