Stepping Out of My Element

Saturday, July 31, 2010

Good morning!

In the process of moving I discovered something that I had forgotten all about. It was an unused canvas that I hid in the back of my son's closet for the first year in Lethbridge. When we moved to the new place, there was tons of wall space to be filled so I decided to paint! I haven't done much, or maybe even any, painting in a couple of years. Before that, I always enjoyed the process, but the end result was never what I envisioned. This time, I decided to keep it simple. I had been inspired by some homemade wall art I'd seen recently on blogs (here [scroll down, it's dandelions in red and white] and here). Mine is obviously different, but the basic, bold colours and simple images are what they have in common.

When I have a project that I want to complete, I don't have the patience to wait until later if I need help with some aspects of it. So for this, I rigged up a ridiculous little "contraption" so that I could project the image of cutlery onto my canvas. What I did was tape the cutlery to the back of a chair, and then stack a bunch of random objects on the seat to boost a flashlight up to the right height. The flashlight projected the shadow of the cutlery on to the canvas. It worked great in the end! I used white chalk to trace the shadow onto the canvas because it wouldn't leave behind problems like pencil sometimes does.


 For the painting, I obviously had made the whole canvas blue first. Then I painted the cutlery white so that the green would cover better!


Here it is in its new home in the dining room!

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