Inspired By Friends...

I was inspired by three of my favorite blogging friends who are also artists, to paint something soft and and somewhat impressionistic...

Michele at "Hello Lovely"
with her beautiful beachy grays

 Kerrie at "Sea Cottage"
with her soulful renderings of the sea
and as always she has her seahorses and sanddollars and more...

and i'm always inspired by
Erin at "Erin's Art and Gardens"

  who's beautiful ethereal paintings just blow me away

So with this inspiration I faced my canvas today with just a concept, of softness, and ease, and spirit
and decided to let the canvas tell me what it wanted to be...

I only knew i wanted to use a very soft toned down blue,

and maybe some contrasting dark colors

and here is what i ended up with...

i put a dark frame around it in Picassa because the darker color makes it stand out...

here it is without the frame...

let's imagine it on a white wall now

as you can see, everything is simple, blended in some places, and not blended in others, 

all of it is about not trying too hard...

i had the bottom part on this one very dark brown, but the painting told me to go lighter

so i did
i just wiped out some of the raw umber, 
(one of the reasons i love oil paint, it dries slow, it's quite forgiving) 
and then added in some of the blue mixture from the sky color...
instant grayish softening effect

Since my paints were all spread out, and still wet, i decided to do another

sometimes you just get on a roll like that...

without frame

on a white wall color

Wanna see a mess!?

my brushes

four of those are dollar store brushes

and here is the famous dollar store brush, my favorite,
 the one that costs $1.00 and i always tell you to grab when you're there, i buy em by the handful!

This is the kind of painting i thought i could do a tutorial on 

so you guys would try to paint

I practiced recording myself with my iphone propped up on a tall  chair with about 10 plates stacked up and my iphone teetering up on top of it all...
 it was still too low, and recorded me up under my chin
never a good look

and then i looked at the recording

OMG

holy crap, I look and sound like that!!!?
and what started out as... 

i want to help my sweet friends paint a painting and discover their inner artist.

became

i need botox, and juvederm, and my hair is too long, and my lipstick is on crooked, and i sound stupid

uhhh, ... cindy... what ever happened to your paintings from the spirit 
 and being yourself and being natural, and having fun talking to your blogging friends on video about painting???

the hell with that!
i need an emergency dermatology appt. and about $10,000.00!
or i can never be seen in public again!

anyway, i am working on it still
getting old sucks

you can see that on a  blue wall, the painting is not too interesting, ho hum... yawn, boring...

but put it on a gray , or a darker wall, or even a white wall... and then you have something that would look nice, soft and pretty on a white wall, and it would pop like a gorgeous translucent blue marble on a dark wall!

the paintings above are simple, they're not clutch your chest, pay thousands of dollars for, make you famous paintings

but they're fun, and you can do this!

you don't have to do anything fancy - simple is wonderful!

they're pretty colors,and pleasing to the eye

and they would look good on alot of wall colors
basically i brush in my most intense color up top, then get lighter as i go down,
that's where the dollar store brushes come in

also note the blue is very light, in some places almost no color at all

 notice that some of the sky color is also brushed into the ground color... 
there is a pretty good amount of blue in that brownish looking ground !

another thing to think about is that if you get too bluey, and bright, it can be cartoonish looking, even though you will be tempted to use intense bright colors... because they're pretty... don't!

i even add brown to my blues and white to tone it down

colors used:

ultramarine blue

thalo blue

sap green

raw umber

yellow ochre

titanium white

here is my palette with these colors

all great colors i use over and over for lots of different things!

anyway... i want to end with this amazing photo i found on pinterest
isn't this just so touching, and so so beautiful

(and it has the same colors i used in the above palette, just concentrating more on grays)

click photo to go to source

 

...the end...