Project: Canvas Art

It took a while to decide what to do for this blank space in the lounge room. I'd always thought I would do some sort of 'artwork'.

Now I'm definitely not an artist, so I tried to play with paints and textures.

All I did here was buy a couple of canvases, large enough to cover the area. It needed to be about 1 mtr - 1.5 mtr wide and about 1 mtr deep.

My collection of paints (see 'Helpful Tools') includes a box full of sample pots from the times I've tested possible colours for various projects over the last 6 years. Some are quite bright, so I've used them in another canvas art project I'll feature soon.

For this project, I found a sample pot of a fairly neutral background colour. This is Dulux 'Espirit', a light green grey colour.

Next, rummaged through my artist's acrylic paint to find a suitable red - Vermilion Red, the brown is Burnt Ochre, and I mixed the green using Matisse Flow 'Australian Yellow Green' as the base.

The technique - acrylic paints are 'wiped' or 'scraped' on using a wide plastic scraper (see 'Helpful Tools').

The tubes of paint were easy to work with. I squeezed a line of paint along the canvas where I wanted the block of colour, then scraped the paint down as far as I thought looked OK. I kept doing this until I had a reasonably thick layer of paint, leaving ridges where the scraper had run over the wet paint, to give some depth to the 'artwork'. In some lights this effect also throws shadows along the ridges of paint.

I repeated this with the other two colours, and painted the sides of the canvases where the green match up.

This was great fun and hardly took me any time at all.

Dulux Colour Awards 2010 - update

In my last post about the awards, I had received confirmation that my entry had been received.

When I came home from work on Tuesday night there was a 'Dulux' letter waiting for me. Knowing that the competition was so good last year, as I started to open the letter, my comment was that this would be the notification of my entry not making it to the shortlist.

You know how it is with a letter like this, you don't really read it, and you scan it as quickly as you can to see what the bad news is!!!

I couldn't find any bad news.

MY ENTRY WAS SELECTED FOR THE SHORTLIST OF STUDENT FINALISTS!!!!

So, I'm off to Melbourne at the end of the month to go to the Awards night being held at the Guildford Lane Gallery. The awards are finalized March 30 2010, with the winners being announced March 31 2010 at the Gallery.

My formal invitation arrived in the mail yesterday.

My whole philosophy for this was to enter to gain and, I suppose, enjoy the experience.

Let the experience continue!! Will let you know how I go and I'll post some photos of the night.

As a postscript, 10 iscd students entered the competition this year. 6 of us were shortlisted; the best result the school has had with entries in the competition.