Grisaille underpainting in oil - portrait of Tayla

It has almost been 2 weeks since I last posted! Life is busy and good and while I have been working on several resin pieces, they are waiting to be resined so not at a great stage to take photos off.

However today (while my lovely children were supposed to be asleep) I started this grisaille underpainting of Tayla so that I can have the matching pair to go with Carter's one. Actually the Tayla in question was sound asleep while I was doing this, however her brother has since woken her up and has had no sleep at all and I can currently hear the "conversations" going on in their bedroom through the baby monitor while I type this.


Here is it next to Carter's portrait so I could check size wise and composition wise that they will match. Sorry about the glare it is a beautiful sunny day today so the garage door is open so sun can stream in. As it is supposed to be Autumn and raining today, I am enjoying the sun.

I will do some more work on this underpainting before I start the glazes, I just want this initial layer to dry first. Will keep you posted.

Resin and textures again

Over the past few days I have had lots of fun playing with with acrylics, texture and then resin! I haven't done anything like this since early last year and it was a nice break from oils and I think I may continue to play for a while.

The painting is an abstracted seascape. I wanted to capture the feeling when all you see is an expanse of turquoise and the sky and sea are almost merged. I used heaps of glazes of both acrylics and acrylic ink and then rubbed gold leaf into the sea part to represent the preciousness of our oceans and its living treasures. The canvas had been quite heavily textured with various modelling pastes.

Once the first layer of resin went hard, I put more gold leaf on top and then resined again so when you see it in real life, you can see the gold suspended in the resin.

It is really really really hard to take photos of resined artworks so I have given a few options below so you can get the idea.

This one shows a bit of the interference gold that I used between glazes which gets reflected on certain angles.

And this one shows the extreme reflections that you get with resin. I love resin and it was so much fun to play with it again.

I also did 3 small ones in a similar vein that I will post later once I get some decent photos of them. I may do a bit of a series with these more abstracted landscapes, seascapes with resin, I need to do some brainstorming with my sketchbook and get some inspiration but they were so much fun to do and in this hot hot weather we have at the moment, the layers of glazing dry pretty much within minutes so you are not waiting. It works out well with looking after the munchkins as I can dash up to my studio, do a glaze and then come back and be mummy.

And speaking of the munchkins (well one of them), my gorgeous son came outside with me this morning to help me take these photos and decided to pose for me with his beloved Hairy (was a Hairy Maclary toy which has been so well loved he has lost most of his hair and half his nose and I have done numerous plastic surgery operations with a needle to keep him going). I am thinking I may have to draw this photo as I love it so much.