The Road Unknown

“There may be aim and meaning on our path – but it is the way, which is the worth to last.” “On the move” – Karin Boye 1927

Photo manipulation. Eight layers in Paintshop Pro 2018.

 

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Sometimes it gets personal

 

Every now and then art gets personal – it ceases to be an experimentation by the artist and becomes a reflection of the artist.

This piece ties in with what I have shared on another blog:

daily life

almost melt-down

shopping

why bother?

Smoking is bad for you

Photo Manipulation in Paint shop Pro – 2 layers. ©Eva Spångberg (Isskulptur Djurönäset) and darkangelkiss (STOCK of an anarchist2)

There really isn’t much to say about this – I felt like creating something, and this was the result.

Cave Painting

So. I have not been doing anything creative for 5 years – well that is what happens when you are on the spectrum… depression and anxiety combined with general life collapse, and there is simply not enough energy for creativity.

However, lately I have felt some stirrings of the creative kind…

Cave Painting – photo-manipulation – 3 layers using Gimp 2.0 Textures by ©Eva Spångberg (Isskulptur Djurönäset) and ©enframed (stone). Artwork © Henric C. Jensen

Not too bad considering that I have no access to Paintshop Pro 8 which is my preferred tool for this kind of work, and I have to use Gimp 2.0, which I am not familiar with.

I used 3 basic layers: photo of a generic boy from Shutterstock and 2 texture layers from friends.

apologies

i apologize for not having been around for a few days – i have been in bed with a nasty cold. the kind that makes you feel like you are dying in a thousand ways, and wishing you were dead in at least one way…

i might not find the energy to paint for yet a while, meaning that i might not post to this blog for a while either – it is tricky to paint when you could end up sneezing at any moment – adding solvents to the canvas that do not mix well with oil paints…

to tide you over for a bit – try out  some of the links to other blogging artists –  you find them on the left hand side of this blog.

tools

colors

i am allergic to traditional solvents like turpentine, so i have to use water mixable oil paints – right now i am using Windsor & Newton’s Artisan series. i have used Reeves’ water mixable oil colors, but although they are cheaper than W&N and vastly cheaper than Holbein, i also find that the fluidity of the colors are lacking – i.e i need to use more medium to get a consistency and texture i can work with. also i feel that the pigment/tinting is not as good as in W&N.

Color Chart

Mediums

i use water mixable linseed oil,  water mixable thinner and basic water mixable artis’ts medium (all from W&N) – what i do not use is water. yes it is cheap, plentiful and all that, but it tends to make the colors look ‘grey’, ‘listless’. water is good for cleaning the brushes, palette and rags with, but do not mix it into anything you want to put on a canvas.

Brushes

… are very much about personal preferences, artistic style, and technique. personally i prefer to use synthetic filbert brushes. though some techniques (shummring) i use are done best with a traditional hog brush.

Surfaces

… are also very much about personal preferences. i will paint on anything that i can cover in a white acrylic base and place on my easel. if you feel that you want the canvas feel, but cannot afford a traditional canvas – a canvas covered cardboard is a good alternative. often artists’ shops will sell in packs of 10 on a discount if you buy the same size.

well i am running out of time here, so more on a later date – among other things – how to preserve specific colors i have mixed on my palette…

cave paintings

well the title is a little misleading – there will be no cave paintings today, because i am simply too tired after a full day of socializing, fixing with meetings and doing stuff on the phone. so today will be a blank bullet in my blog.

favorite artist – 3

since i have mentioned him as one artist whose technique i would like to learn, it is only fair that i add him to my gallery of favorite artists: Turner

Joseph Mallord William Turner RA (23 April 1775 – 19 December 1851) was an English Romantic landscape painter, watercolourist and printmaker. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivaling history painting.[1] Although renowned for his oil paintings, Turner is also one of the greatest masters of British watercolour landscape painting. He is commonly known as “the painter of light”[2] and his work is regarded as a Romantic preface to Impressionism. –

so let’s have a look at his work:

Fishermen at Sea exhibited in 1796 was the first oil painting exhibited by Turner at the Royal Academy.

i love this one because of the uniform color scheme broken only by light sprinkled throughout the painting.

in contrast the next one is resplendent with colors and hues and details – and the title is ingenious:

The Fighting Temeraire tugged
to her last Berth to be broken up, 1838 – oil on canvas, National Gallery, London.

San Giorgio Maggiore at Dawn
1819
Watercolour, 224 x 287 mm
Tate Gallery, London

look at that – it is almost monochrome with a dash of pinkish yellow…genius.

serendipity

something amazing happened the other day. i had run out of paintings to work on and picked up a wood panel i had prepared some weeks ago. i had coated it with white acrylic paint and then put it on a shelf. i found it under a pile of carbon-copy paper, and some of the carbon ink had rubbed off on the panel. first i tried to remove it with some of the thinner i use when i paint. didn’t work. so i tried acetone. well it melted some of the tape i had covered the edges, but didn’t remove the smudges fast enough for me, so i poured the acetone over the panel, and then soaked up the acetone with tissue. that worked, it better than worked. it etched patterns into the paint on the panel, clearing some parts of the panel of carbon smudges, diluting some other parts…and left an amazing ‘image’ – which i decided to ‘enhance’.

Ereshgikal

now it’s not finished, but it will be.

doing a turner 2

remember this post? well i finally dared to give it a try – i transferred the photo to a large canvas, traced the important parts and… then under painted in white, pale yellow, bright red and a grey i got by mixing alizian crimson, ultramarine blue, viridian green and titanium white:

i did a lot of blotting with a rag, to get rid of the brush strokes.

i let it dry out and then i added some more bright red and yellow and painted in the foreground in payne’s gray. again i did a lot of blotting with a rag. i really liked the almost three dimensional effect i got from the foreground against the background. it reminds me a lot of some background/foreground work done by Disney Studios.