(Insert something pithy, inspirational, or funny)

Well, surprisingly, it's been over a year since my last art project. I was feeling the itch again, but was out of canvases. So, with a recent sale, I stocked up on my supply. And, with Christmas season upon us, I decided to make a painting for a friend's gift.


Using her favorite color (pink) and her favorite verse, I was able to create a simple personalized gift.

With this project, I decided to try out a couple of new twists:
1. Normally I try to get the outline of the canvases to be a quadrilateral...but for this one, I let be an odd shape.
2. Normally I try to have all lines be the same size...but for this one,  I had all vertical lines be one size, and horizontal lines be another size.
3. Normally I try to have all lines be the same color...but for this one, I had different colors for the vertical and horizontal lines.
4. I also added text to my Mondrian-style painting, which is new.

We'll see how I feel about these experiments, as I may try them again in future projects.

Stay tuned.

I recently got inspired to do another painting. This time it was just for the fun of it...I wasn't making it for anyone in particular. 

I had some extra canvases lying around and decided to do another multi-canvas piece. 

Just like last time I wanted to take a single color and do a painting with various shades of the original color (by adding white). So, I went down to the local Home Depot and got myself some "Cobalt Glaze". It's a dark blue. However, when I put that color on the canvas, it really reminded me of the blue Mondrian used in his paintings. 



So, I decided to call an audible and go full Mondrian and add a red box, a yellow box, and make the rest off-white.

Here's the end result:

One of my friends at work had seen my previous paintings and asked me to do one for her office. Since I was in need of inspiration for a painting, this worked out well. She had mentioned that one of the walls had purple, so I went with that theme.

For the purple, I wanted it all to be in the same "color family" (don't know if that's right term for it). So, I bought a dark purple, and for the different shades, just kept adding white paint to lighten it up.

I was going to make the lines gray (one of the other colors in the office), but after painting every canvas entirely gray (as is my custom for colored lines), and after I put the purple on, I really didn't like the shade of gray. I thought it was too "green". So, I debated between 3 choices: find a different gray, paint the lines white, or paint the lines black.

When painting lines after the fact, I prefer to use acrylics, since they won't bleed as much, and it's easier to do. I can use a painting knife for it, after the tape is set up, so it's quite easy. Since I was going to have to use acrylics, I didn't want to go with gray, since I would have to mix the color, and judging how much to mix, so that everything is the same color, can be tricky. I was afraid that white wouldn't do an adequate hide, so black was the easy choice.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Coming up with a Christmas gift for the grandparents can be tricky. This past year I decided to give them a "coupon" for one of my paintings. They don't have a lot of wall space, so I couldn't use one that I had already made.

Here's the basic process I go through for creating one of these multi-canvas paintings:

Step 1. Sketch a rough draft. It's always good to get an idea of what you're going to do, before you put paint to canvas. Maybe it's just the accountant in me, but I don't want to waste paint/canvas (i.e. money) on something that's not going to look all that good. It's also good to have a guide so you know where everything is supposed to go, later.
Step 2. Apply the tape to where the lines will be. Make sure to use a tape that is adhesive enough to block the paint from going under it, but also will unstick with ease.
Step 3. Paint. I find it a lot less stressful to paint when the tape is there to protect my errors.
Step 4. Remove tape and you're done. I'm still going back and forth with which I prefer, painting the lines before or after the boxes. If I go with "before", what I'll do is paint the entire canvas the color of the lines (usually black). Then I'll apply the tape, where the lines should be, so that I can just remove the tape and be done (like in this case, though I left the lines white...i.e. "unpainted"). Otherwise you have to apply a lot more tape afterwards. Plus, it's a lot more work to make sure the new lines are of equal width their entire length.

So, there you go. Nice and easy. What's great about acrylics is that it dries quickly, so the whole project can be done in an afternoon.

Well, here's my latest painting. It is a belated Christmas present. I wanted to explore the blues & grays some more, using multiple canvases.



Although I really enjoy creating and painting, my current goal is to get to a place where I'm content with the finished product of my work. When I look at my paintings, all I ever see are the mistakes. I guess I have two options, get better at painting, or get better at designing it so that mistakes are less obvious.

Well, the next logical step in my artistic development was to go completely abstract. I also wanted to go bigger. All my prior paintings had been done on canvases that were smaller than a piece of paper. Thankfully, I had received some gift certificates for art supplies, so I bought a bunch of bigger canvases.










With a pile of canvases lying around, I also decided it would be interesting to try creating a multi-canvas piece (or two).



The most enlightening moment in my artistic career came while at the Smithsonian in Washington DC. I came across a piece by Piet Mondrian. It was so simple, just white boxes with a few boxes in the primary colors. It was inspiring. I decided to do my own take on his painting, by recreating it with multiple canvases.

 With this new found inspiration, I started developing my own style.