I am never in a million years going to be a real painter. I can't make paint look like anything other than paint. So landscapes, portraits, animals? All out. And abstract painting is incredibly difficult. I look at gorgeous abstracts and think to myself, "Oh, I can do that..." Then two hours later I have something that is abstract for sure, but also a hot mess.
But shapes? Painted shapes? Shapes I can do.
This painting was originally intended to hang in our bedroom. The canvas is huge (3'x4') and I thought it would take up a lot of the endless wall space space. But of course, I forgot about things like matching. And how, yes... the stripe on the wall is a shade of blue, but the curtains have all sorts of colors in them. And the quilt has a pale pink. And the feel in there is actually turning out a lot more beachy, muted & soft (in a good way!) than I thought it would be.
The plan was always circles and I thought I would just be painting myself. On a whim, Sunday night, I asked Paul if he'd want to help paint while we watched TV. It went something like this :
E : "Babe, you, uh, wouldn't want to paint with me, would you?"
P : "Sure."
E : (trip over my feet running upstairs to grab an extra paint brush.)
Paul painted dark blue circles. I painted teal circles. We sat on the couch and turned the canvas 90 degrees every 10 minutes or so when we had filled the space with enough of our color. In total, we probably rotated it about 8 times and added more white to our paint to create different shades. We watched three episodes of Always Sunny and then called it done for the night. Paul went upstairs to do some other stuff and I stared at the canvas until I realized that what it really needed was some lime green.
So with Arrested Development now in the background I finished off the painting by layering more lighter shades of blue circles and a few variations of green.
It turned out better than I thought it would, but also a lot brighter. As mentioned, it doesn't work in our bedroom so we're putting it out in the hall. I love that it's a wall of color when we leave our room.
And I love that you can see it from downstairs too. (ps...here's a link to that pinwheel painting.)
We're pretty excited about our $25 canvas (Michael's coupon for the win) and colorful circles. I'm pretty excited Paul was willing to help out.
This is project 8 of 27. I am attempting to complete 27 craft projects using 27 different materials before I turn 28 on 02.22.13. You can follow my progress here on the blog or on pinterest. Birthday challenges are my favorite. You can see the 26 Projects I completed while 26 here and the 27 materials I have used so far here.