get your paint on...

I have enrolled in 'Get your paint on' a five week online painting class with Lisa Congdon and Mati McDonough.  We are into week 2 and our second assignment is to find a painting by another artist that we love and take something from that painting and incorporate it into a painting of our own.  Well I chose a Kiwi artist I recently discovered during the Christmas holidays... Mandy Emerson.  I just fell in love with a painting of hers behind the counter in a little art supplies shop in Greytown.  

Mandy Emerson uses the intense colours that I really love and she seems to use a lot of mediums that don't like each other, that produce a chemical reaction.  I like this idea and have done it in the past with oil based printing ink and shellac.   So above is the first part of my play with this assignment... I have used iridescent oil sticks with a light layer of acrylic paint.  The water based acrylic has a very subtle dislike for the oil layer underneath and has produced a nice effect.  I have then lightly brushed areas of the paint off with my fingers so the shiny oil stick colour glows through in places.

I have actually found this quite fun, it was the first time I have had a real play on a stretched canvas... one thing I didn't like though was that I couldn't use my stamps on it as the surface wasn't strong enough to take a print from the stamp... more soon.