Art!!!

Wow! I can't believe a month has passed since my last blog post. It's been a busy few weeks with life and art and friends visiting.

All the abstract experimenting has led me to changes in my art. In this piece I worked with many, many layers of high flow acrylics and also using some of my stencils.

 What you can't see very well in the photos is the gold I used.

 Not just as paint with the stencils, but also gold-colored metal leaf at the end.

The result is a beautiful 9 x 12 inch portrait, somewhat mysterious and quite layered. This painting has sold.

The following painting is quite a bit larger (16 x 20 inches) and here I again worked with stencils, but this time using them with light molding paste to add texture and structure to the painting.

If you look in the lower right corner, those flower shapes are raised.

As are the flowers in the photo below. Such gorgeous texture!

I'm really enjoying working larger even though it takes much longer. And I love painting human portraits again in addition to my animal paintings.

I hope you are having a wonderful June! I'm spending much of it painting and I'll have more to show you soon!

❧ Silke

Stencils and Molding Paste

A couple of years ago I bought a handful of stencils ... and I keep forgetting that I have them! The other day I came across them while looking for something else and decided to experiment using molding paste with them.

One result you can see in this blog post from a few days ago.  And now again. I used the first stencil with molding paste and it worked beautifully.

After applying some paint I worked light molding paste (which I had tinted with acrylic paint) into two additional stencils.

The result is really fun and rather busy. It needs something else. Maybe a focal point.

I'm just not sure yet. Hopefully today will reveal the next step...

❧ Silke

Abstract Painting with Texture

I'm still painting in an abstract style and doing a lot of experimenting. Here, I first prepared the canvas with molding paste applied through a stencil.

As you can see, it gave me a lot of raised texture! Once dry, it was really fun to work on with high-flow acrylics.

Again, I limited my palette to three colors: phthalo turquoise, quinacridone magenta, and green gold - probably my three favorite colors! At the end I also added a tiny bit of iridescent pearl in some of the textured areas.

The result is a very vibrant and interesting painting.

I hope your start to the week is beautiful!

❧ Silke