Monday, July 23, 2012

A Sunflowers Journey...

as of Aug 17

First off, the painting is NOT done yet! I only wished to share some of the process involved, as I started this piece back in early June.
  It was time to re-use and old stretcher frame.


Here is the Sunflower as of July 21. Alot has gone into just getting it this far.
So much more to go...
 
...it all began because I wanted to use Fibonacci numbers in a sunflower painting. So once the canvas was stretched, the mathematics began. Argh.

Of course, being me, I also wanted texture. That meant filling in all the spaces between the lines, one gentle drop after another, going from both directions. This took more than a little time. Especially because I decided to do it twice. There just was not enough texture for me after the first pass, and I am a glutton for punishment.

Then it was getting the petal base coat on. Went fairly smoothly after the eye-numbing texture part!


Finally I could start to add color, once all the base coats had dried. I thought it would be nice to paint outside in the sun as I worked on the petals...the wind had other ideas, and after I had just painted the last bit of yellow, boom, down goes the canvas face first onto the concrete. It took me 3 hours to clean every spec of dirt out.

So then it was time to add more depth to the seed area. After this became brain chilling, I switched to getting some fill color in and the start of a basic background.
Was feeling pretty good about the progress at this point, knowing I have many hours left to really make it all sparkle. So Saturday I was once again outside, with flower firmly attached to the easel this time and got much accomplished.

So 2 months in, a fair bit done, a fair bit to go, the journey continues...