Last Blast of Summer

We’ve had our heat wave (hopefully) the last couple weeks and now have some cooler temps, which hint of the coming fall. With that, I thought I would give a last blast to summer with these summery aceo’s. They’ll be available later tonight on etsy.

I’ve wanted to start using paints more in backgrounds of my art. I picked up a couple new acrylic paints recently (I only have mostly old colors from when I was painting my wood crafts and they are country colors, like pine green, and heartland blue, yuk.) So picked up some pretty blue colors. I love this new (for me) blue called Tahiti blue and with paint in hand and no idea what I wanted to do, and already out of my comfort zone just thinking about painting, I dove in. I thought I could always just throw it away and no one will ever know.

I picked a few scraps lying around my desk and divided them up on three cards. I randomly layered them along with painting the blue on the background and/over the papers. I didn’t like them at that stage. I then stamped French script with white paint. Seemed a little better. Then I went to my images. I had no idea what, but I decided to go with a type of image I’ve never used before, so I picked a couple nudes and bathing beauties and moved them around to find what background I like them on. Ok, getting better. Looking at the nude lying down, she didn’t fit on the card and when I looked at her I decided that she should be a mermaid. I’ve never done a mermaid in my life and always shied away from them. But I found a piece of paper that was a copy of a famous painting and thought it would look great as the tail part. I drew a tail section and cut it out, added some glitter, a few white acrylic paint squiggles and called it done. The other one of the nude looking in the mirror, I added a stamped crown done in the same blue paint. I added some cut pieces of white fine netting and tinted some gel medium with the paint and layered the netting pieces with the gel medium to add some texture. I then added some “spots” of glitter, and some tiny wings. The last one of the bathing suit beauty, I didn’t do anything special, but I did add some tinted gel medium to simulate the water under the pier. I’m pretty pleased how they turned out and they actually came together quickly, even though I used elements and mediums I’d never used before.