Shaking It Up - Perspectives from The Artist's RoadShaking it up Perspectives from The Artist's Road There is comfort in mastering an artistic medium—often taking years, maybe even decades, to become fluent enough with our materials and tools so that we can express ourselves with confidence and fluidity. We come to see them as old reliable friends whom we can trust with our tenderest creative notions. However, after some time carrying on successfully in this mode, we can actually become too comfortable and slip dangerously close to repeating, in variations perhaps, what we know how to do best. This is considered a desirable achievement in almost any other profession, but not art.
I ordered some Yupo, which comes in a couple different versions, and began painting on it. For anyone used to the way cotton paper behaves with watercolors, forget just about everything you know. On Yupo, washes puddle, pool and mix together in completely different ways. Strokes don’t blend together well at all, so the surface has a very calligraphic look. If you have your table on a tilt, as we do with traditional watercolors, then the washes of color all slowly run downhill to a big muddy pool at the bottom. Perfect! A challenge was what I wanted and now I had a big one. I am still experimenting with this weird stuff and I have to report that it is fun to work with precisely because I don’t know what I am doing or what I am going to get, if anything. You are seeing some of my experiments here. Best of all, it is very easy to correct—just wipe off with a towel, and voila! clean Yupo, ready to go again. No worries of ruining expensive paper - just freedom to play. Try it yourself, you may find it is exactly what you’ve been looking for. |
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Member ContentFree ContentThe Artist's Road StoreNocturnes - A Primer on Night Painting Filled with inspirational examples by the masters of nightime painting, this little book is sure to fire up your creative energies. Never tried painting at night? We show you how it's done with a step-by-step-oil demo and a tale of night painting in the wilds of Rocky Mountain National Park. The Primer on Night Painting - Nocturnes is a 7 x 7" PDF download with 40 pages of text and images. It includes a gallery of paintings by masters of the nocturne, information to inspire and encourage you in your plein air nocturne painting, an illustrated step-by-step demo and tips for working in pastel and oil. Also available in a softcover edition. Check out the tools and other products that we use in our own art and travels in The Artist's Road Store. We only offer things for sale that we enthusiastically believe in.
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