KT Painted It: Leopard Painted Sea Shells

I'm really excited to share this post with all of you! I've been working on painting these shells for the last two days, and it has been very rewarding watching the paintings unfold. I think my trip to the national gallery of art may have been the underlying inspiration to start painting these pieces.

In an effort to help me relax and preoccupy myself while I waited to hear about my board scores, my mom collected 20 or more sea shells from the beach for me to paint. I painted three on our trip to Nags Head, which you can see here!

So here is my work station. Ergonomically it sucks! But I like having background noise (hence the Harry Potter movie marathon that I began yesterday...currently watching the sixth movie...dont. judge. me.) Oh, and the "You're Awsome" mug was a graduation gift from my brother-in-law and his girlfriend - and I want both of them to know that I sat drinking out of that cup as I anxiously awaited by board scores and I PASSED! But I digress...

I decided to paint a set of two leopard shells. Why leopard? Well I think they are beautiful animals and the my leopard purse might maybe may have sparked my imagination. 

I painted the back of both shells gold first, and then the underside of the shells white. I'm not an expert shell-painter, but I've found that using white as a base helps the other colors to stand out better. 

For the first shell, I decided to paint only the eye of the leopard. Here is my process:

Next, I moved to the larger shell. I painted over the white with turquoise, which matched the color of the eye of the leopard on the first shell. Then, I traced my design onto the shell with a black watercolor pencil. I painted over the lines with white, and then got to work. 

And here they are, my two leopard sea shells hand painted with acrylics!

 I also painted a set of three peacock shells which are absolutely lovely!

If you are interested in purchasing these shells or others that I have designed and painted, visit my Etsy shop! I'm currently working on a set of zebra shells :)

Thank you to everyone for supporting me and visiting my blog. I appreciate all of the support! Please leave comments with suggestions for did-its or any feedback

Happy Painting/Crafting/Living Life to the Fullest!

Katy-did

KT Painted It: Sunset Beach

I've never painted anything on a canvas.

I've also never painted a picture for someone else.

Drawing is different - pencils are easier to control. Paint on the other hand. Meh...not so much for this untrained artist-want-to-be.

All self-degradation aside, I wanted to paint a picture for my hubs for his birthday this year.

One of our favorite pictures is of a sunset we watched while at Key West, FL in 2011. Here is the picture:

Amazing, right? This was one of the two pictures that we asked my little sister to paint for us for Christmas, but she chose another one instead. Eric was a little bummed, and I told him that I would paint the picture for him. So here is my attempt!

I decided to use a technique with short brush strokes using acrylic paints and a brush type called a "scrumbler". Here are my paints and brushes (a 4.0 and 6.0 size). The paints are all acrylic.

I chose a 24x30inch canvas for no particular reason, but it turned out to be a good thing that I didn't go any larger because using such small brush strokes was tedious. 

I printed the picture that I was attempting to duplicate, and taped it to the top of the canvas so that I could look at it while I was painting. 

I started from the bottom with the ocean, and worked my way up toward the sky, incorporating all of the colors that I could see, trying to add as much dimension as possible (woah! that sentence has a TON of comas...)

Here is was I came up with. A couple of notes to myself for the future - I really liked the 6.0 brush that I used for the sky. The brush strokes were not as coarse, and the colors blended together a lot nicer than they did for the water using the 4.0 brush. 

Next, I added in the tree line. I decided to make the tree line taller than the original picture, which was reflective of being closer to the tree line. In doing so, I also decided to bring the tree in the foreground of the picture "close" by making it larger in the front of the painting. Here is the tree line below...

And the final and most arduous task: the tree in the foreground. I really wanted to make sure to have enough details to show the leaves and the skyline in the background between them. This was not an easy task! However, I'm pretty excited about the results:

Finally, I went back and improved some of the parts of the painting that I wasn't so happy with initially. I also added some more color to the sky to incorporate the clouds from the original painting.

Here is my finished product:

This was a Katy-Did-It with love, for my amazing husband. Happy (early) birthday, Eric. I love you so much!

KT Painted It: Pop Art

Drawing and painting are two of my favorite past times, particularly using watercolor pencils. Unfortunately, like any skill, art takes practice...which is not something I do often. Given the fact that I only have one week left of my vacation from school, it seemed to me that it was time to dust off the art set and workout some of those artistic muscles.

Well, it was a rusty start, but after a few sketches of flowers I decided to try a type of artwork that I have never attempted: Pop art. Pop art began as a visual art movement of the 20th century made famous by Andy Warhol who painted the notable Campbell's Soup Cans and Marilyn Monroe pop art portrait. 

 

I cannot really describe my process because I really had none, other than to look at various pop art pieces. I chose two photos of iconic figures, the first of Bette Davis and the second of Audrey Hepburn.  I knew that this would be challenging since I am NOT a portrait artist, but this blog is all about trying something new, even if I turn out to need some practice at it or if I flat out suck (which would certainly be the case if any of these experiences involved sports!)

In this end, these were my paintings. I had a lot of fun making them, and felt completely inspired to keep practicing this form, as well as to keep trying new types of art!