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I have 111 books in my studio (yes, I counted them) that are Tutorials,  and I acquired them slowly over about 10 years.  I find that I no longer go to them for inspiration, and decided to get rid of them.  Before I do that, however, I’m going to TRY to do ONE PAGE out of each book.  Wish me luck……

Book:  Creative Watercolor Workshop by Mark E. Mehaffey

This is an AWESOME book.  Although it’s focus is Watercolor, I concentrated on the content referring to composition and color in an abstract painting, and used Acrylics and miscellaneous papers.

Here’s the end result.  It is just a hot mess……  In spite of that, I really enjoyed the process, and I love this style when it’s done well, so this just means I’ll have to do more like it to understand HOW to do it well.

I worked on this, in 10-20 minute fragments, over 6 days, and took a photo every time I paused….

My color palette, and some of the papers I might use

Laying down some color

Adding some marks

Laying down papers.  The text about finding her hand eventually gets covered up.  The paper helped me start dividing the canvas into primary and secondary areas.

Setting the Focal Point – an image transfer of a ghostly raven

Laying on paint, then scraping back into it.  At this point, I was still happy with the color.

Here’s where things start to go south….  I added Neon Yellow (not part of my original color selection), and some of the blues turned green, ugh….  I covered up the problematic areas with text from an old german book.

I then poured REALLY dark purple over the whole painting, and while it was still wet, removed it from the areas I wanted to draw the viewers eye to.  But now the whole painting is waaaay darker than my original intention.

This whole piece just got completely out of control, and since it’s NOT a keeper, I could do whatever I wanted.  I poured Neon Yellow over the whole thing, and wiped back in some areas.

Yeah, it’s a big fat disaster, but since no cats were harmed in the making of this art, who cares………..