6 Panel Art Project – Part 7

Progress so far:

As of 2 weekends ago, the only part of my 6 panel project that still needed paint was the tree on the middle “daytime” panel:

That’s it!  So simple.  It should have been over and done with in 20 minutes.  But it wasn’t.  I settled down at my art table in the girl cave 2 Sunday’s ago to paint the tree with the liquid silver leaf.  I shook the bottle as directed, then realized the afternoon sun was right in my eyes.  I stood up, closed the black velvet blackout curtain, and sat back down.  I decided to give the bottle one more shake but forgot I’d already unscrewed the cap… OMFG!!!

The silver leaf went everywhere.  All over my panel, all over me, all over my desk… some got on the floor.  It was a complete, toxic, oily mess.  I ran into the master bathroom with my panel and stuck it in the sink to wash off what I could, but the sink was too small.  I ran downstairs to the kitchen and tossed it into that sink & used a hand scrubber to get as much silver off as I could [and in the process irreparably clogged up the scrub brush… sigh].  I did get most of it off.  But as I posted that evening, my panel was fairly ruined, mostly from the water damage [the panels are canvas board, which has a cardboard base, which is why I rarely use canvas board anymore]:

       

I let it dry overnight and was happily surprised the next morning to see it wasn’t warped [my biggest fear] and it looked fairly salvageable.

When I got home from work that Monday I sat down at my art desk to try and repair the damage.  I decided that instead of taping the tree I’d paint the tree silver first, then go over the parts of the background that needed work:

The tree came out great, but when I tried to touch up the background it just wasn’t working.  It’s nearly impossible to paint a gradated background in bits and parts.  It’s sooooooooo much easier to do it with large, sweeping strokes, because you’re going so fast the paint is still wet, making it easy to blend the colors as you go, from light to dark or dark to light.  So I ended up taping the tree:

You can kind of see in this closeup what I mean about doing the background bit by bit versus all at once.  The background in the middle of this shot looks like CRAP – the pink goes up and down like a hilly hot mess instead of straight across and blended:

So after the tree was taped [which takes forever, but it had to be done], I settled down on the girl cave floor and redid the entire background:

Then removed the tape the following day.  And realized I was still screwed.  Each time I taped the tree some paint inevitably collected up against the tape, creating a thicker patch of paint and forming a ridge once the tape was removed.  After TWO tapings and TWO background paintings, there were some very large ridges:

      

I tried to hide the ridges with liberal application of liquid silver leaf, but it didn’t really work.  And upon closer inspection, I realized my other 2 light/daytime panels [which I thought were done] also had unsightly ridges:

       

[Wow, those 2 pics look like they’re meant to go side by side LOL!!!]

So yeah.  This past Saturday I made a trek to the art supply store 3 towns over and picked up some more 11×14″ canvas board, some new paint colors, and THIS awesomely huge brush [the 2nd pic shows my awesomely huge new brush next to it’s pink-handled predecessor]:

        

Which I just realized I spent $32.09 on!!!  OMG… but it was totally worth it!  Although I would have never spent that much if I’d noticed the price at the store.  Holy cow.  It’s a Regency Gold Synthetic Decorate Brush, 1½” wide, for future reference.  Because I would definitely buy it again.  It’s that good… The brush I used the first time around was half that size.  The new, larger brush made super quick work of the gradated background on the 3 new canvas board panels:

       

Here are closeups – I love how smooth the color transitions came out, and how each one has some striation.  I have positioned them one on top of each other so you can see the color transition from daylight blue down to early morning sunrise:

Of course, my first attempt at photographing my newly painted panels resulted in this, because cat:

I only used 5 colors – Cadmium Yellow Medium, Cadmium Orange, White, Alizarin Crimson, and Phthalocyanine “Phthalo” Blue:

Alizarin Crimson is one of the new colors I bought last Saturday and I think it’s my new favorite.  It mixes like BUTTER.  Not literally.  It’s just soooo smooth when mixed with other colors.  It’s one of Bob Ross’ favorites, so I recognized the name at the art store and decided to give it a try.  I think Bob was on to something…  He also likes Cadmium Yellow & “Phthalo” Blue, which have always been on my “go to” list for color basics.  I learned about them back in college when I took a few painting classes as electives.

SO.  Next up will be FREE-HANDING the silver tree onto the 3 NEW light/daytime panels.  Wish me luck…  and then I can move onto the final stage, which is still a secret 🙂  The only one who knows my plans is hubby, and he’s skeptical, but has faith in my abilities.  Love you, hubby!!!

I’ll end this post with pics of 2 meals I’ve managed to cook this week:  grilled veggies [eggplant, zucchini, summer squash, and one lonesome veggie dog we found in the freezer] last Saturday and crock-pot chili Tuesday: