Femme de feu XI - step II... Last pass before the roller!

I did a second color pass this afternoon, stopping short of a finished look to leave some room for paint application with a roller...

After 2 weeks of house painting, I find myself perfectly accommodated by a 2 inch brush for most of the work, favouring the illusion of details rather than real details per se. This seems logical since the last pass will be with a 3 inch roller!

Femme de feu XI - step I... A return with experimentation in mind!

It's finally time to get back to some serious painting. At first, I wanted to add another painting to my vortex series. Instead, I decided to experiment using the roller on a couple of female mixed martial arts fighters. This is a quick sketch on a 30 X 30 piece of raw cotton canvas...

..followed by a first color pass...

I will also go for a different color scheme than the usual red for the "Femme de feu" series. This scene is pretty harsh, so I hope that abstraction patterns with the roller will attenuate somewhat that character.

Note to self: "It suddenly dawned on me, I don't look at the subject matter any more, concentrating instead on rendering the different values in front of my eyes. This is real progress... and it took me 40 years to get there!"

So much for art this week.... the constant gardener is back!

A large quantity of wet snow this winter took a toll on my old garden edge... and forced me to implement a drastic "rejuvenation" cut...

Looks like I'm gonna have to learn to live with my neighbour at least for a season!!! I'd really like to start a new painting... but for now, I have to clean up that mess...

Note: We are experiencing summer weather in March this year!

Thinking about.... house paint!

I should be able to get back to my art next week as we managed to realized our major house renovation project within 3 weeks flat. I used high quality acrylic house paint for this project and had a chance to observe its behaviour on cloth, in occurence, my pants! From soot (my previous off the wall experiments) to house paint on raw canvas, there is only one step... and it's a small one!

Note: I will always favour transparency but I'm also interested in using any deconstruction techniques to distort reality a little. The "thick cream" consistency of the house paint that I used is the attraction here, and price is not the driving force.

Been painting lately...

I didn't have the time to pursue my art this week but did exert myself with the roller...

Sooner than later, I'll be back to some "real painting"...

Note: This "Southern living" style with walnut flooring and golden yellow walls should give us plenty of light during the daytime... but I can't hide the fact that this could be an acquired taste by Nordic standards!

Femme de feu X final... Back to painting with a roller!

The final pass with a roller required some fiddling around...

... in essence some readjustments to accommodate raw cotton/linen, which differs a little from raw cotton. I'm attracted by diffused deconstructed images... so it looks like it's going to be my saga for the remainder of the year!

The guy who revamped our oak flooring (sanding and re-staining) seems to have been the better artist this week ;-)