On the Trail

acrylic, collage on w/c paper, 10 X 11″

It’s a trail leading somewhere; the campaign trail or a spelling bee or a swarm of bees. I am caught in the tangle of it, looking for meaning, not finding much. Best just to step in and hope for the best, accepting whatever comes.

For many years I was strictly a watercolor painter and I thought that only watercolors could give you the beautiful transparent color, where the light goes through the color glaze, bouncing off the white paper below.

However acrylic paints run the gamut of transparent to opaque.  In this lesson we established some bold black on white shapes and then glazed transparent acrylics over to get the astonishing effect of color transparency in sheer color notes. Most paint companies let you know which are the transparent pigments. Golden Paint spells it out in two ways on the bottle you buy!

Wear It or Ride It

I’m woefully behind on posting!  So I’ll be playing a bit of catch up, because the art keeps happening regardless. My Experimental Acrylic and Mixed Media Painting Workshop at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts was over a week ago. Students came from as close as Sebastopol and as far as Little Rock, Arkansas and the creative sparks were flying!

We started out with warm ups and getting the paint on in expressive ways involving squirting, splattering, scraping, finger smooshing, oh and a bit of brush painting as well.

Demo: acrylic inks and gesso on w/c paper, 10 x 10″

The title of this little piece is Wear It or Ride it, though I didn’t see the figure until I looked at the picture I’d taken.

We went on to create ground textures with acrylic mediums and papers. Then, paying attention to design and color factors,we developed the textured beginning by glazing with acrylics.

Free Demo

Join me next Friday afternoon at Rileystreet Art Supply, 103 Maxwell Court, Santa Rosa, CA for a demonstration I’m doing.  It’s free, but make sure you register. Here’s the scoop!

Acrylic Glazing With Textures
Presenter: Susan Cornelis
Friday, November 22
1:30-3:30

Oh, the variety of fun textures you can achieve with any of the acrylic gels, pastes or gessos! You will feel emboldened when you see fluid acrylics and inks mixing and settling into the textural designs in surprising ways.

Debossing, embossing, decalcomania and other textures will be demonstrated and combined with glazes of fluid acrylics and inks for dramatic effect. Stencils, stamps, color shapers and some household items will be employed! Hopefully you’ll go home and be inspired to find your own texture making tools.

Susan Cornelis is a mixed media painter and popular workshop teacher with a studio in Sebastopol. Visit her gallery at http://www.susancornelis.com. For information about her workshops, newsletters and videos visitwww.imaginewithart.com 

To register, please contact Rileystreet Art at: (707) 526-2416