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February 10, 2018

The earth phoenix

Acrylic on canvas, 60x20in. Sold for $250. Available as a print and on mugs and stickers at Redbubble.

I was inspired by a photograph of a hillside at sunset. I really love how white fluid acrylic mixes with the other colours to create a sense of brightness. I began by painting the background with Ironlak fluid acrylics. I sprayed on plenty of water with a spray bottle, and tilted the canvas around a bit to blend the colours.

The paint always looks so much bolder when it’s wet. I love the dark pink “mulberry” colour in the bottom left corner of this picture, and how it blends into the lighter pink. Using light and dark shades to create depth adds so much to my paintings, even in abstracts.

When it was dry, it looked like this.

I thought it looked kind of like a dreamy, rainbow-coloured mountain. Or maybe a fantastic rainbow-spewing volcano. A friend of mine saw something totally different – the entrance to Bifrost, which is a mythological burning rainbow bridge that connects Midgard (Earth) and Asgard. This is why I love sharing my artwork with others.

Now, this is where I ruined it. While the above was still drying, I noticed some weird little black bits had found their way into the painting. I tried to get them off with my fingers, but I messed up the paint. I sprayed water on to try to fix it, but it created an awkward blob shape in the middle of the painting. Just great.

I thought well, I’ll worry about that later. I poured green paint to create grassy hills. I can’t really show you the resulting mess because I didn’t photograph it, but it was horrendous. Really. It seems like every time I reach for the green paint, some disaster happens. Green is not a creative colour. I tried adding brown, thinking maybe that’ll make it look less like a bright green blob. Nope, that made it worse.

When the fluid goes rogue, it’s paintbrush time. I painted the grass instead.

SO much better already. You can see some of the weird-looking fluid on the left there. I painted the rest of the grass, which really didn’t take as long as I thought it might. I quite liked how there was still watery green from the fluid blending into the background – it added to the surreal, dreamlike feel of the painting. I decided some of the grass should be windswept because reasons.

Now it was time to paint over that damn blob. The painting needed some kind of focus anyway. Landscapes are great and all, but they can look a bit empty without some kind of entity for focus. But what does it need?

FANCY BIRD.

I found a photo of a peacock in flight online. Peacocks are the fanciest of birds. They always make me giggle because they’re just so over the top. Like it’s not enough that I’m a gigantic, shiny, colourful bird with super long tail feathers- check out my MASSIVE TAIL FAN. However, after painting the peacock, it still wasn’t fancy enough. This wasn’t a place for any ordinary fancy bird, this needed a legendary status fancy bird.

So I made it rise from the grass, glorious in its allergy-causing earthiness. Fly, earth phoenix, fly! It makes sense anyway – you can’t be a fire phoenix if you live in the grasslands. You’ll just set fire to everything.

February 8, 2018

In the red

Acrylic on canvas. Not for sale.

This was a painting I did in a class run by Elana Mullaly for Ironlak in Brisbane. It was based on an aerial photo of some kind of salt flats. Originally it looked very different:

The still-wet painting.

However by the time it dried, most of the paint had run off the canvas. This was kind of upsetting, but I brought some paints home and tried to re-do it. This is how I learned how hard it is to keep fluid paintings completely level while they’re drying! Canvases come with little chunks of wood for stretching the fabric, but I used them to hold up one side of the canvas while it’s drying. This is why painting this way is an all-day process – I have to keep checking it every hour or so to make sure the paint isn’t sliding off.

I tried painting on the floor, which hurt my back. Then I tried painting on a table, which worked okay for small canvases but not large ones. These days I paint on a special easel that can be adjusted to lie flat, which was worth every penny.

The end result looks great in my living room.

February 8, 2018

Sticky

Acrylic on canvas, 23.5×23.5in. For sale – $120. Also available as a print and on products at Redbubble.

I love honeycomb – it’s one of nature’s beautiful patterns. Also it’s delicious. I made the background of this by printing out a hexagon as a template, cutting it out, then tracing around it in pencil on the blank canvas. Then I painted over the pattern in black. I used fluid acrylic and water to make organic-looking shapes in the honeycomb cells. Then I added more fluid acrylic to the top of the painting to drip down like sticky honey. This was the trickiest part – getting the drips to drip down straight. It was made even harder by the fact I was painting outside and it was very windy.

I found that it was easiest to get straight drips when I was inside, and if I added no water to the fluid.

I prefer a “gritty”, textured look to my paintings so I sprayed some black aerosol onto the drips before they dried.

Finally, I looked up a picture of a bee online and copied it onto the canvas in purple using a paintbrush. I thought purple would really pop against the yellow background. This was a lot easier to do freehand than I thought it would be! Maybe I’m getting good at this.

February 8, 2018

The great black yonder

Acrylic on 3 canvases, each 24x12in. For sale – $200 for the set.

This began as something VERY different – a picture of a storm – and ended up looking more like a space image. Believe it or not, I used a lot of green paint to create this but most of it just ended up on the floor. This is one of my earlier pieces, so I was still learning the best way to use fluid acrylics in my apartment without all the paint running off the canvas.

At some point I just ran with the abstract concept and let it become whatever it wanted to become. I used a lot of black and white aerosol. The final painting was very dark, so I brightened it up a little by swiping metallic rose gold acrylic paint onto the canvas using a palette knife.

February 8, 2018

The bright universe

Acrylic on canvas, 20x16in. Sold for $120 Also available as a print, on apparel, and on other products at Redbubble.com.

I was attracted to these colours when I saw them on a fancy cake on Instagram. I decided to create something abstract and colourful and boy, did I get it. I used fluid acrylics and gold aerosol to create this painting. The crackle effect was the result of pouring undiluted fluid acrylic into watered-down fluid acrylic and letting it dry.

February 8, 2018

Beat

Acrylic on canvas, 36x36in. For sale – $300.

I didn’t have a plan in mind when I started this large painting. It began as a very abstract piece.

Unfortunately what happened was that I added so much water to the fluid acrylic paint that it formed a heavy puddle in the middle of the canvas, drawing most of the colour to the centre. As a result, by the time it dried it looked more like this.

I added the streaky pink bits on top afterwards, but it didn’t really seem to help. So I looked at it a different way – what’s that shape in the middle? An apple? A heart? I decided it looked kind of like a heart, and thought an anatomically correct heart would be pretty cool – kind of edgy. So I found a diagram of one online and went for it.

Due to the size, it’s a pretty confronting painting – not for the faint-hearted, so to speak. But the colours are vibrant and fun, so I think it gives the room an edgy, punk kind of vibe.

February 2, 2018

The magician’s dream

Acrylic on canvas, 20x30in. For sale – $250.

I was inspired by an agate stone, but the final design really went in its own direction. I began with a base of blue and chrome fluid acrylic.

Blue moon…

The chrome acrylic is a silver paint that has a really interesting effect on regular fluid acrylic. The effect above was created by squirting a pool of blue paint in the middle of the canvas and adding the chrome paint around it. The chrome was drawn onto the blue and decided to float on top being shiny. Not quite what I had in mind but pretty cool!

Once that was dry, I added one of my favourite Ironlak colours “sushi” – a pinky-purple colour, and more blue. I sprayed gold aerosol using the same technique I’ve used before to create waves in the wet paint. Added a bit of swirly-swirly action and got this.

I probably could have just stopped there – this looks nice. But it just didn’t feel done yet. I was originally going to simulate the sharp edges of the agate crystals using painter’s tape to create straight lines but…er…I forgot. So instead I decided to use blue and chrome fluid to make kind of a dotty effect in the middle. Usually I’m not a fan of this effect but this time I thought hey this will be great.

Of course I didn’t like it so I sprayed the heck out of it with water and it went all swirly and nice. After I took a photo, I decided what it really needed was a continuation of the middle blue onto the side, creating a nice two-thirds blue effect and connecting the parts of the painting a little more. That was fine, but for some mad reason, all the blue paint I added on the side started running off the canvas at this one particular spot, which made the paint flow in a weird way. So I sprayed that sucker with gold aerosol to seal it in – sorted.

To connect the gold a bit more, I added a sand-yellow which is kind of like a matte version of rich gold.

It’s usually at this point that I look at the wet painting and think, this looks too simple, add texture. So I sprinkled some salt on the bottom left and it made a really awesome ripply effect. Nice.

After that, it was just a matter of waiting for it all to dry. Usually I check on it while it’s drying, to adjust the angle of the easel (sometimes paint is slowly sliding off one side) or to spray a little water in some areas that are drying in a way I don’t particularly like. By the morning it had dried into the final image you see. It’s always kind of a surprise to see the finished painting with this technique.

February 2, 2018

Unwind

Acrylic on canvas, 24x36in. For sale – $200.

Believe it or not, this painting began like this:

Fluid painting on my awesome new easel

Looks a bit different, right? Like a completely different painting. Yeah, that’s because I originally had this idea that I’d do some kind of pastel-hued fluid painting and then swipe acrylic over the top with a palette knife and you’d just get pastel colours peeking through the white, like the sunset behind the clouds or something. Well, it really really didn’t work that way.

The irony of this entire project is that I wanted to paint something very relaxing. The sort of painting you could hang in a hotel lobby or a doctor’s surgery, that everyone would look at and think “ahh, what a lovely relaxing place I’m in”. But painting this thing was a pretty crazy process.

First, I ruined the original fluid painting with white aerosol.

Welcome to my pastel nightmare.

Some of you might be thinking hey, that doesn’t look so bad! Well nuts to you because I hate it. I stared into the abyss of my own self-loathing, rendered in pastels, and I didn’t feel relaxed at all.

So I thought, maybe if I continue with the plan it will come good. I got out the palette knife and the white paint and went for it.

Why are there brown smears on it? I don’t have a bad answer for that but I certainly don’t have a good one either.

Nope, still hideous. I thought, you know what? Let’s just paint over the whole damn thing.

I fixed it! And by fixed, I mean I painted over the top of it.

Hey great, now it looks nothing like the original painting, which is a definite improvement. I thought it looked kind of like clouds or water or something, so I decided to paint a swirly line through which would look kind of like the shape water or clouds make if you draw a line sort of downwards through the edges. I had a new silver Ironlak paint pen to use so I tried that out.

It literally looked like someone had scribbled on my painting. Like some kid had just vandalized it. So I painted over THAT with gold paint. But rich gold is not relaxing. It’s not relaxing at all. You’d think being rich is relaxing but noooo it’s way too exciting to be relaxing. So I went out and bought pale gold paint and painted it on but it didn’t look organic enough. So I went over the entire line again with a paperclip. That’s right, I used a bit of wire instead of a paintbrush. This was really, really tedious. But finally I got the result that I wanted! Success! Rejoice! No, I mean relax!

All in all this took about a week to paint but it was worth it in the end.

February 2, 2018

Rockpool

Acrylic on canvas, 36x36in. Not for sale. Prints and other products of the earlier version (below) available on Redbubble.

This painting was inspired by a beautiful aerial photo of a swimming hole in Tasmania, Australia, that I found on Pinterest. The colours really grabbed me, and I liked the idea of using painter’s tape to create straight lines as an interpretation of the cracks in the rocks.

I started with painting water and sand with a bit of black aerosol and black salt for texture. Black salt sounds like some really fancy artist ingredient, but to be honest it was just something I had in my cupboard from a recipe I made a year ago and I never use it in my cooking because it looks like pepper and I find that really confusing. Salt is something artists often use to draw moisture in wet paint which creates an interesting effect. I’d recommend not using black salt unless you also like these areas to look, well, black. Luckily I’m cool with that.

I let this dry, then added some gold aerosol to shine through in the lines from underneath the final pattern.

The dry painting base with painter’s tape.

I got such a great response to this work in progress on Instagram, that I almost felt bad about covering it with more paint. I find that sometimes when I get a positive response to something I create, it just makes me feel more pressured to consistently do stuff that other people like. So I’m glad I can put that fear aside and just keep on listening to my inner voice that says “this isn’t finished yet, keep going!”

I added pink and orange, with liberal sprinklings of gold and white aerosol and waited for the layer to almost completely dry before taking off the tape.

This was the first time I’d used painter’s tape this way, so I was surprised to find that when I peeled it off, the paint had bled through the tape. So much for the nice clean lines I’d had in mind! But I actually liked this result anyway – it created a more complex, gritty effect which I’m really drawn to.

I’m so, so happy with this one. There’s so much going on but it still has a broad beautiful shape. To me, the painting puts me in mind of how the ocean meets modern civilization. This painting has pride of place in my living room now.

February 2, 2018

Crash

Acrylic on canvas, 30x40in. Sold for $250. Prints and other products available on Redbubble.

This piece was inspired by the ocean crashing against the rocks. It reminds me a lot of the coastal areas where I grew up, where that crazy ocean would leap onto the rocks repeatedly.

I used a technique that I learned at a class by Elana Mullaly for Ironlak Brisbane. She showed us how to spray aerosol onto watered down fluid acrylics to create a “wave” effect. This also created a barrier between two paint colours – perfect for dividing the blue sea from the brown sand or rocks. This is the first painting I’ve done since that class where I feel like I’ve really “got” the technique. I love how the fluids and the aerosol create a beautiful sense of movement.

I added a bit of geometric abstract flavour to it in the form of straight lines criss-crossing over the painting. I used thin painter’s tape (like masking tape, but low acid so you don’t hurt your paint) to create the lines before I added the paint. I still hadn’t worked out how to get clean lines this way – the very wet paint “bleeds” through this way. But my intention wasn’t to create clean lines, but rather to create a template I could use to draw gold lines over the top as a final step. This worked fine, although painting the lines by hand was pretty tedious. Next time I’m going to try painting a transparent gel medium over the tape to seal the edges, before I add the paint on top (a tip I found from Googling this problem after the fact).

The painting, still wet, with the painter’s tape visible from underneath.

I finished the painting with a touch of gold aerosol – my instinct just told me it needed it.

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