Lush Summer Art - Treasury East

Lush Summer Art - Treasury East
Originally uploaded by Franny B

My first Treasury East and I love it!
I've been really enjoying curating the Flickr galleries, so it's a great discovery to find out I can now do the same on Etsy. :-)

Click here to view the clickable Treasury: www.etsy.com/treasury/0585ea1db89cc84bf13d5800

My Colours

Some of my favourite paintings. Is there a recurring theme?

My Colours
Originally uploaded by Franny B

New Paintings - Negative Painting & Frisk Film

Negative Painting - Bee on salvia

Painted from Sarah M's lovely photo: www.flickr.com/photos/daftdabbler/2127038309/
From the group 'Artists Sharing Photo References' : www.flickr.com/groups/aspr/

I haven't tried this sort of thing before, so the background went a bit wrong. And I didn't know what I was doing with the negative painting, so I didn't really manage it. I quite like the richness of the colours tho - I'll just have to try again!

To see some fantastic negative painting, and a great tutorial have a look at Beverly Morgan's Flickr stream. Here is a link to 'Step 1' of her tutorial: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bevmor/4291143834/

And here is an example of one of her beautiful negative paintings, "We follow the Sun":

Frisk masking Film - Painted lady

I painted this background right after painting the Bee background, so at least I knew to work fast and not let parts dry. What I hadn't quite realised, was that I didn't need to put down such strong colours. I think I was just panicking in my rush to get paint down before the paper dried!

This was also my first experiment with 'Frisk' masking film. I can't believe how easy to use and brilliant it is! By the time I'd stuck it down, drawn round my drawing, unpealed it, stuck it back to the backing paper, cut out the shapes and stuck it back on the paper, it was really not sticking at all. But when I painted the edges down with water and then paint the film stayed magically in place! Now that I've got a better idea of how to use it, I won't do that sticking, unsticking thing again and I guess it will be even easier!

I'm not sure if it's worth trying to darken or lighten the background. Or if I should just learn from the mistake and have another go...

Painted from my photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/franny_b/3859767453/in/set-72157623158286092/

Latest Paintings

Sunflowers

This started out as a quick 'Shirley Trevena' style practice painting. It went a bit wrong in the middle so I thought I'd try adding some collage bits to it. I tried to keep it simple by only using some sheet music strips, some blue Japanese patterned paper and the central sunflower which is a piece of paper I painted yellow and then used pen and watercolour to add detail.

I'm not sure if it's finished yet.


Water Lily

This is another attempt to get the lose and expressive 'Shirley Trevena' style. It was a very late entry for the Lotus watercolour challenge from Lorus Maver's great photo: Lotus Challenge Photo. There were so many beautiful paintings from this photo, by the talented Flickr group, that I had to give it a try. All of the versions can be seen in the group's pool here: Lotus Challenge entries

The 'Watercolourist, Painting with Light' group has been running challenges like this for a year now but this is the first one I've taken part in. Hopefully I can start catching up with the others from now on!

This painting is predominantly watercolour, but I've also used a bit of salt and some coloured pencil in places. And quite a bit of wax candle for the sparkly highlights on the water and lily pads.

Little blue jug

Again, I'm trying to work on still lives in a Trevena style. I bought this great little jug and bowl in a charity shop recently and I'll probably be using them in many more still lives to come. I've used water-soluble pencils in the background and for some of the details of the bottle. I used a wax candle for the pattern on the bowl - not ideal, but I've run out of masking fluid. I've also used a bit of the pencil sanding technique in places - i.e rubbing watersoluble pencils on sand paper over wet paint, it gives a great speckly texture.