Week Five of Painting Class

Vintage Floral Sheet, acrylic and gouache, 6″ x 12″ wood panel
This was the final week of Lisa and Mati’s online painting class, Get Your Paint On, and our assignment was to choose between starting a new painting, or revisiting one we’d done during the other weeks of the class. I was anxious to start a new painting, and had already begun rolling around ideas in my head.
That is, until Emma recommended I not paint a quilt this week.

“Why?”, I asked.
“You’ve painted alot of quilts already, you might get tired of them.”, she said.
I chuckled. I’ve painted only 4 paintings IN MY LIFE and they happen to be of quilts. I’m not really tired of anything yet.
However… taking a talented artist’s advice is not a bad thing, so I decided to change it up this week.
I picked one of the painterly floral sheets I’ve collected from the thrift store as my subject matter. These are the cheeriest thing in my studio these days… they even made their way into this month’s inspiration image (wrapped around the skeins of wool). I love the cheery patterns, the blues and yellows of the florals. I chose to focus on the wrong side of the sheet, but included the hem detail at the top (which shows the fabric’s right side), including the content tag. It was an extremely satisfying image to paint. My color mixing has already become quicker and much more intuitive since I started with my first piece. I have a better understanding about what area needs thicker paint, what needs watery, thinned down paint. I wanted the detail of the tag to be as clear as I could make it, and to make the floral pattern as painterly as the original sheet. I changed the background of the original sheet to a more modern gray shade in my painting, instead of the original white.
I want the sheet I painted.
This course, my first experience into painting, has been incredibly eye opening for me. I know that I will continue to paint, I really love it. I am realizing that so much of this is practiced and learned through time and patience.
See week’s one, two, three, and four.
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I hope everyone is enjoying last Friday’s granny squares! I want to be super clear that we are not copying that original pattern. Do not want anyone to get the wrong idea. This is a newly created pattern, combining different granny squares in unique combinations. I have no other sampler version to show you to help with gathering your yarn, but once I have a picture of my own sampler to show you, I will.