30 Day Challenge (and what I never showed you)

Acrylic 8x8"  Unfinished

What happened to me during the 30 in 30?  Did I stop painting?  Yes I did, about a week ago, when I had to start getting ready for a trip.  But before I stopped painting, I stopped blogging.  I thought I would feel guilty if I didn't paint every day during the 30 Day challenge, as I said I would, but it turns out I would have felt guilty if I DID paint, because that would have left all the trip preparations to someone else.  But I thought in this post, I would tell you about my new challenge, show you what I never showed you (and for the unfinished ones, tell you what still needs to be done), and tell  you a bit about what my plan is for art during my trip.  Then I will send you on your merry way, until we meet again...

The painting at the top of this post is unfinished.  I need to bring more blue up into the bottom of the flower to work the edges more.  That's how we do the edges with fast-drying acrylics, friends!

My new challenge for myself is called 30 Paintings I Like in However Many Days it Takes to Complete Them!  And I invite any of my blogging friends to join me!

OK, art on my trip.  Sadly decided it was not practical for me to bring my acrylics.  I am going to be renting a vacation house and didn't think it was right to be cleaning acrylic brushes there or saving up the pigmented water.   I tried some palette knife paintings with acrylics, thinking that might be a way to avoid all the water.  With a palette knife, the waste in between colors goes on a paper towel rather than into a bucket of water.  However, my experiments showed me that that would be impractical.  Palette knife uses a lot more and a lot thicker paint.  Not practical to carry that much paint on this trip, and those palette knife paintings took three days to dry!  May as well bring oils!

So--my plan is to bring watercolors and colored pencils.  Watercolors to be able to do my block in and colored pencils to fill in what I want to make more detailed.  Watercolors because the plein air that was pure colored pencil below really starting hurting my hand (Terri!).  I mean, why hurt your hand and take 20 minutes to do a sky when you could do the sky with a watercolor wash?  The thing is, I am not very familiar with watercolor, although I do have some paints.  I am more familiar with gouache (opaque watercolor), but some of the gouache I have smells like solvents, which I don't want to deal with at all in the car.  So, it will be watercolor and CP!  Another art adventure.

                                                   Acrylic Plein Air with Palette knife

                                              Acrylic Plein Air wtih Palette Knife

                                                 Unfinished, Acrylic, actually 12x12"

The above painting is actually 12x12."  My scanner bed isn't that large, so had to just scan part.  This one is unfinished.  Needs her hands painted in, her feet finished with highlights, and a shadow underneath her.  

 

Plein Air Colored Pencil

Oh, and as promised, my "miracle" colored pencil paintings that I found again during this challenge after years of being missing.  Read about the "miracle" here.

Sorry the photos aren't that great for the last few.  Even the CP's are on boards too large to put on the scanner, hence the blur, I suppose.

Hope you all are having as beautiful fall weather as we are....enjoy!!!