Acrylic randomness

These acrylic paintings are done on two half sheets of watercolor paper, front and back. There way no planning involved with any of these. I just put the paint on the page and decided later what it would be. I worked on all four at the same time using relatively few colors. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in the planning, I never get to the painting.  So these whimsical pieces were just pure creative juices flowing. Which one is your favorite?

Dancing

Meditatio

The Mind

River

Patterns #2 - orange circles, blue triangles

Still working with the idea of submitting artwork to the Rancho Cordova city council's art show in patterns, here is piece number #2. I started with circles again but instead of aligning them at 90 degree angles as before (Pattern #1 - stars), I aligned them at 60 degree angles, and created a Star of David within each circle by drawing lines to each point that the circles meet. After I had it planned out in copy paper, then I recreated it on watercolor paper. I chose orange and blue because they are on opposite sides of the color wheel, complimentary colors. I had thought about red and green, but it seemed to Christmas-y, and it made sense to have the Star of David be blue. 

The challenge again was to get an even wash. I think I did pretty well with the orange, and after finishing about 5 or 6 triangles, I got the hang of it and I think most of the rest of the triangles are even. (can you tell which were my first ones?)

Pattern #1 - stars

This project was in inspired by Rancho Cordova's city council when they announced an art show based on patterns. I have always been fascinated by geometry so I thought I would play around with some new ideas.

This design is based on Arabic patterns. I started it with four 4" diameter circles. I inscribed two squares within each circle.  With the base lines drawn, I added in some other lines to create the "8 petal flower" and stars. 

This is my practice piece in pencil, then photocopied (the original circles didn't show up) and then traced the lines I wanted to emphasize in Sharpie.

I then recreated the pattern on watercolor paper and extrapolated the design to fill the page. I painted a base color of Azo yellow over the whole piece.  Then I went in with a flat brush and put a wash of Anthraquinone blue between the stars. The biggest challenge was to get a consistent color with the blue wash. It started out a little darker than I wanted, but then got too thin and created a green since the yellow was coming through. Once I stepped back from it though, I kind of liked the flow of it, so I left it as is.