My Yesterday in Pictures for, Nov 27, 2019 😊 – Painting with Marble Dust

My Yesterday in Pictures Format

I’ve simply built my daily walking & painting up to the point where I need the time for these two vital parts of keeping me healthy and/or sane, lol!

Plus, instead of having to work images into the My Day Ahead series posts, this new series will enable me to keep those as pure text, and supplement with images from a variety of possibilities here. It’s an experiment of course, so we’ll see 😊

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(Re)-Experimenting With Acrylics (and – new – Marble Dust)

First off, Happy Thanksgiving everyone! 😊

And secondly, My Day Ahead series is on hopefully short hiatus while I digest (literally?) the Thanksgiving holiday ❤️

All that said, yesterday, in between adjusting to another 30/40 degree swings in the last few days, and preparing for a Thanksgiving feast w/family here in Austin, I snuck in a couple hours to begin an experiment w/acrylics and marble dust!

My Yesterday in Pictures for Tuesday featured over a dozen years of floral photography I’ve captured and yesterday (Wed) I decided I’d give one of them a try, but differently than in oils, my preferred method since 2000 when we moved back to Austin from Galveston.

I’d never been able to get the texture I wanted from acrylics that I had with oils, though I’d tried a great many mediums and even bits and chunks of rocks, lol! But I’d never tried (and hadn’t known of) using marble dust to thicken my paint. So I’m going to give it a try, and it may still not work, having less than a handful of acrylic colors. But I’m giving it a start. That’ll hold me til I can get past the holiday and go out picking the colors I want and need to try for the effect I want. Meanwhile, here’s what I did today 😊

The scrawly Notan above was step one. Though I’m currently reading a book on Notan, I actually took Diane Mize’s suggestion in one of her videos (and in her book) to (more or less) use the process to explore what I’m seeing, and, how I want to present (transpose) the image. As you can tell above, my top right 1st attempt was way off fitting in the image the way I wanted. And even my cropped photo choice (below) differs from the full image I showed Tuesday in my post. This is somewhat different from my usual pattern where I just start painting. Luckily my intuition has “usually” let me create something I really like, but not always, lol! This time around I want to see if these new-to-me-fangled art ideas of doing a Notan, and drawing a grid, and mixing marble dust into my (this time) acrylic paint, is worth it. Marble dust is rapidly becoming my add-to product (vs medium) to my oil paints. We’ll see if this pattern continues with my re-experiment with acrylics. For a view of my 1986 22×28 red acrylic w/texture and nuance I really like, see my recently re-discovered art work (via unloading a decade old climate control storage unit) here 😊

The grid is not something I’ve used often, though I’ve usually liked the result, like when I did a Mount Mansfield painting last year (2018). In this instance yesterday, I was rushing and messed up my divisions, but I finally got set up where I could do a quick lay-in of two of the flowers. I was very pleased with the texture I got w/the acrylic tan-white via adding a small amount of marble dust. Whether it’ll hold up, or flatten out more than I like, I should know by tomorrow. If it’s just somewhat flattened, then I know to add more marble dust. Just like in cooking, my wife says ❤️

The marble dust btw, is Fredrix and I got a bag Dec last year via Amazon, and have barely made a dent in the supply! It’s going a long ways! That or I’m just haven’t needed a whole lot, lol! After all, I’m not doing any 30x40s or 36x48s like I used to, not right now anyway 😊

One last thought I wanted to share about my experiment is in regards to following, or in my case, not following the exact lines, is – a nice thing ‘bout creating florals has to be the fact that flowers are partially beautiful just due to their shapes – flowing! If I can capture a flowing-ness to the art piece, I’ll have already partially succeeded. That a petal is larger or rounder or such than originally captured, or originally drawn, is less relevant to me than capturing the shape of a flower’s shape in paint 😊

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Be safe, be well! 💕

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My Day Ahead series posts elaborate on both my day ahead & the day past, my yesterday. 

My Day Ahead for Thursday, Nov 27th, posts well after this post, and may carry a bit more commentary about the images above, though the series may be on hold for Thanksgiving. It’ll also automatically show up via the link above when posted – thanks everyone!

Adan

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Adan

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