Paint Party Friday

It's Paint Party Friday again and this week I went craaaazy.  Totally, out-on-a-limb, wild.  Are you ready? I didn't paint on paper.  (GASP!)  This little fledgling has decided she's ready to paint on something more substantial and bought some cheap canvas boards.  And to be even more daring and reckless, I actually took my time with this one, adding one layer at a time and completely waiting for the paint to dry in between.  Told you it was a crazy week.

I had to keep reminding myself as I went along that if this next layer totally sucked, I could cover the whole thing in gesso and start again.  I took pictures along the way in case I wanted to go back and recreate a certain stage.

Last night I was loving and thought it was done. This morning I'm not so sure.  I'm thinking I went too far with it and I like some of the earlier layers better.  Here's what it looks like right now:

It's about 9"x12"

Here are the pictures I took along the way:

Gesso, then tissue paper, then more gesso.  A few shades of orange paint.  Stamped with dark orange , stamped again with white paint and large bubble wrap.

I used jar lids to stamp some circles and then filled them in with gesso

I colored on top of the gesso circles with water soluble oil pastels in two shades of orange and then blended them together.

I painted some newspaper with gesso and orange paint and cut out some circles.  I also added a torn piece of hand-painted tissue paper near the bottom.

I gessoed over the newspaper circles, leaving an orange border.

I added more newspaper circles and printed tissue paper, and colored those newspaper circles with oil pastels.

The final stage was to fling dark orange paint all over it.  (go back and look at that first picture).  I think I like it better without the painted tissue paper layer and without the paint spatters on top.  Still, there's a lot I like about this and it was very satisfying to work on the board.  I'm going to sit with it for a while before I do anything rash.

And speaking of rash....remember last week's "final" version of that big brown and aqua painting?  If you left the party to go the bathroom or were too busy picking the hazelnuts out of the bridge mix, you can see it again here:

It didn't even make it through the day.  By the time I got home from work Friday night I was SO over it.  I got out the paper cutter and hacked it into 4"x6" postcards.  I've been adding more paint and layers to enhance them.  I like them so much more than the big painting.  Here are a few:

This one's my favorite

Crazy color discrepancy between the big picture and the little picture.  It really is greenish aqua rather than bluish turquoise.  The picture of the big painting was taken with my camera whereas the postcard images are from my scanner and show a truer version of the paint.  

Now I'm wondering if anyone chose to accept my background challenge.  What?  You were in the kitchen rummaging around for more wine and you missed my background challenge???   Last week I encouraged you to print out my background and do something with it.  Go back here to download it if you still want to play, and put a link to your completed work in the comments if you already did.  

Happy Paint Party Friday one and all!