When life gives you lemons, draw them, 11 x 14 inches dry pastels, graphite on paper

"When life gives you lemons, draw them." (Nikki)

"Color! What a deep and mysterious language." (Paul Gauguin)

Archive for April, 2014

Cameron Can Count

Saturday, April 19th, 2014



 

 April 2014: Cameron Can Count to 30
8 x 8 inches markers, watercolors and fixative on canvas. Thinking that acrylics paint would make pages stick together even when dry, I chose watercolors on primed canvas instead, barely diluting the paint so the colors are dense. Krylon workable fixative works best to protect the work, as it brings out the colors very nicely and it doesn’t hold the caustic smell that regular varnish does.

  1 sunshine 2 shoes 3 blue frogs 4 cups of tea 5 eggs
  6 cats 7 letters 8 balloons 9 trees 10 fingers
  11 toy vehicles 12 T-shirts 13 strawberries 14 colors 15 goldfish


Each page has a hole peeking through to the next page and the one before, where colors match up in such a way that the hole may only be noticed when the page is turned. The holes were filled in for the sake of aesthetics in the images shown here. This peek-hole detail was an afterthought, and since I had already painted most of the pages I was committed to using certain colors, which made the process take longer than it had to. When using this idea next time, the peek-holes will be larger and be the main focus of the book. Large binder rings through grommets on each page hold the book together, so the pages are fairly easy to turn and the book can start anywhere.

  16 footprints 17 flowers 18 clouds 19 bubbles 20 teeth
  21 blocks 22 bugs 23 crayons 24 candies 25 balls
  26 apples 27 snowflakes 28 birds 29 leaves 30 rocks