I haven’t finished posting about my pandemic art series, but I wanted to share a project I just completed and an ongoing challenge I’m participating in. The 100 day challenge is intended to help artists develop a regular practice of creating art. I decided to make 100 floral images. Here is my valentine for my husband. I have uploaded it to my Fine Art America page if you want to get it on cards.

I have participated in the 100 mandalas challenge but I didn’t do it everyday and I lost track of where I was both times I tried it. Part of the loosing track was moving from Wisconsin to New Jersey and then moving back to Wisconsin. But I digress. I have enjoyed the first 17 days of the challenge and I will do more posts on the whole body of work in the future.

Yesterday’s visual garden developed from a larger piece I had created last week.

I really liked the shape of the large orange flowers and decided to create a stamp inspired by it. This piece was an exploration of doodled, abstract flowers with tones of the secondary paint colors. I really enjoyed mixing the paint and playing with the different shades and tints. I love how the colors turned out and I wanted to do it again. This time I wanted to mix 3 primary colors to get a whole rainbow of possibilities. I selected quinacridone magenta, yellow medium azo, and cerulean blue hue in heavy body acrylic paint. I mixed each of the colors with black and white. Both pieces are painted on gessoed paper grocery bags. It is a really nice weight and texture of paper and I have easy access to lots of it. And I always like to upcycle what I can.

I carved my stamp and painted my background green made from mixing my yellow and blue paints. It turned out very yellow when I painted it but it looked green on my pallet. Then I separated some rose images using a paintbrush and water to get soft edges on the tissue paper. This is a Tim Holtz floral tissue paper that I love to use in backgrounds.

I learned this technique for building up a garden background in a lesson in the Wanderlust 2021 year-long class that I’m taking. It was taught by Laly Mille and I loved it. I know this is a technique I will use a lot in the future so thank you very much! I added photos from magazines where I wanted the garden and book pages where I planned to put the text.

I added my own twist to the process and stenciled some flowers in the background. Last summer I discovered the Stencil Girl company and joined their Stencil Club and I love it. I got this floral stencil at the cyber Monday sale and have used it a lot. I let the yellow and magenta combine organically as I pounced paint on it with a makeup sponge. The more realistic flowers are from a Shawn Petite stencil. I love the stencils both of these artists sell and the videos they have of techniques for using them. But back to my valentine. I used gesso to make a clear place for my quote that I printed on tissue paper.

When I tried to stencil the yellow flowers they wouldn’t show up until I put some gesso through the stencil first. I realized I would need some gesso to make my abstract flowers pop. I used the colors right out of the tube and made circles where the flowers were going to go. The magenta and yellow mixed in the process and looked great.

I used my new stamp on the yellow circles and painted purple flowers on the magenta circles using the June 2020 Stencil Club 6×6 inch stencil. This stencil set is my new favorite. I didn’t take a picture of it, but when the flower stamps were on the yellow circles it look like viewmaster reels, does anybody still play with those? I also used my smaller flower stamp and stamped all around. I painted those flowers blue and played with embellishing and embellishing. I just got a bunch of Posca paint pens and I love them so much. Sometimes the right tool makes all the difference.

I splattered some yellow paint and glued my quote down with matte medium. I love how the tissue just disappears. There was too much white around the quote so I added some more blue flowers and it was done.

Happy belated Valentine’s Day. Wishing you love and beauty today and every day.