#paint layering

[aniamariart]

Overflowing my room with this series! Here’s a selection of my favourite paintings including the Kolorowa series. My work revolves around Polish folk art and the beauty of it, taking snippets of the patterns and merging them with a variety of background palettes. 

[mlleclaudine]

by Margherita Cole

Layering paint is a common art-making technique, but Hannah Jensen takes this approach to another level in her creative practice. The New Zealand-based artist uses printmaking techniques like intaglio, etching, and carving to reveal complex designs from boards that are covered with dozens of layers of acrylic paint.

With a background in printmaking and a love for painting, this unique art form felt like a natural next step for Jenson after graduating from university. She begins each piece by applying between 20 and 80 layers of paint onto a wooden board, which contains the full range of colors that will make up the final design. After all of the layers have dried, Jensen uses her tools to carefully scrape away the paint in the desired locations and at the right depth. In this way, she creates varied forms with texture and depth.

Many of Jenson's most striking works feature detailed depictions of flowers and different species of animals. She is able to render a variety of textures by chipping away at the paint with more or less force, which in turn affects the amount of paint revealed from the underlayers. The results of this meticulous process are worth it, however, as each design is so vivid that it appears to pop off the board.

You can purchase original art via Jensen's online store, and see what she's up to next by following the artist on Instagram.

[finticemo]

Paint cutting drill

This is a simple skill-building drill I just made up. It involves using the exact same brush, and only freehand drawing (no other tools), to carve out recognizable versions of predefined shapes.

Goals of the exercise:

Paint complex shapes faster

Add to muscle memory of painting patterns

Deconstruct patterns within shapes better and faster.

Increase stroke economy (reduce the number of strokes needed to define a given shape)

You can observe several of the key factors in this 'paint-cutting' process just by watching the animation -- for example, the need to avoid damaging surrounding pixels. This is like a somewhat hard-mode version of the problem of painting a floor without getting stuck in a corner.

Notes:

Painted using GrafX2, for the clarity of hard-edged pixels.

The second version is just a faster version, because it looks good :)

There is a variation of the exercise that you can do if your paint program has a specific 'eraser' toggle, like MyPaint (which temporarily alters the current brush to paint in Erase mode rather than Normal mode). It's especially useful for working with layers.