I spent a good part of one day last week painting these two canvases for my sister’s apartment. It’d been a few years since I used paint and it was a lot of fun. The night before, my sister’s friend Rachel had delivered this beautiful painting to her for her birthday:
… so I decided to make something that would compliment it. To begin, I made these thumbnails very quickly in Photoshop, and kept referring to them for the first half of the painting process:
My sister already had the canvases and the acrylic paints, so I started with a very limited palette- white, blue, green, yellow and purple. No primary red. First I primed both canvases with yellowish off-white. This is after the 2nd pass.
The next few photos show the following passes. Eventually I realized that I needed to use only pastel colors in order for it to work. It also became much more abstract and off-model after I started messing around with the semi-controlled dripping. In the end, they don’t go with Rachel’s painting at all, mainly because of the limited palette.
Here are the final, dried paintings: