Splashing Through Life - Art by Patricia Henderson

Still working through the ugly stages...adding one feather at a time!

A rainy Saturday, hot tea, mellow music, quiet company and collage. My perfect morning! Working on some feathers.... My companion and fellow ripper of paper.

Here is a peek of what I'm currently working on, a lovely Blue Heron. So far, the background is done and I've applied my drawing of the heron. Next I will be starting to collage! Not the best photo, but you can see the ghostly outline of the heron. Reference photo courtesy of PaintMyPhoto.com

Every month I get together with a wonderful friend and we play! We try out different art techniques and media and  get our creative juices flowing. Yesterday we got out two books by Mary Todd Beam, Celebrate Your Creative Self and The Creative Edge . I was lucky enough to go to one of her week long workshops at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Tennessee about 4 years ago. It was great to get out her books and try out some the excercises. It brought back some wonderful memories. Here are a couple of experiments that I tried yesterday: I Dreamt I was a Dragonfly 9" x 7" Acrylic on Mat Board Under the Mountain 14" X 9" on Mat Board

I'm busy trying to get my tulip collage done today, so I'm going to cheat this one time and post one of the frogs I did as a special order last week. Back to our regularly scheduled programming next week! (Hopefully)

One morning, last summer I was surprised while driving to work when a beautiful Great Egret landed in a ditch along the road. It was early in the morning and so peaceful. I thought it would be a great subject for a painting. I didn't get started on it right away, but in my mind's eye I could picture what I wanted to do. It was going to be a night scene with a dark blue background and a white moon and the beautiful white egret standing in the light of the moon. It was going to be wonderful! Well....not so much.. I decided to collage the whole background. It somehow ended up being a purplish blue monstrosity! I had made a big circular pattern in the background that was very distracting. The bird was too small in comparison to the moon. I used all the wrong colours and papers in the egret. The whole thing was a mess. I looked at it for a few days and decided I hated it. That's when I got out the gesso. It was very cathartic to slap that white paint all over the canvas. I...

I haven't decided on a title for this one yet. It might be because most of the time I start out with a title already in mind, but this painting kind of came about by accident! I had started a really cool painting with the background a collage of road maps with a very thin wash of gesso, and clear tar gel swirled over top.  I washed on some really nice blues and aquas. Over that I was going to collage some monarch butterflies, using my pre-painted papers.... Well, the background was great. The butterlies, not so much. I hate giving up on a painting, but I went for the gusto and took a big brush and gesso'd all over it. Not really knowing where I was going with this one, I took Mary Todd Beam's favourite colour trio of Golden Fluid Acrylics: Quinacridone Nickel Azo Gold, Quinacridone Crimson, and Turquois (Phthalo), and did some random washes. The crimson kind of got left behind! The result reminded me of the sun and some twigs or branches. I had recently taken some phot...

I was so pleased with my last "April Showers" painting, I decided to try another one. This one is based on the daffodils in my neighbours yard. Yellow flowers are definitely harder to do than pink! But I think they look nice together, so I may do a few more!

I was disappointed with my last painting so I thought I'd try something really different. I found a little 8 X 10" canvas and covered it with gesso, then painted with watercolour paint. When it was done, I sprayed it with fixative and then varnished it. It was almost impossible to get dark values with this, but I kind of liked the washed-out effect.

Here's another painting in the Polar Storm series that I'm doing on a textured gesso background. I only use two colours with these: Burnt Sienna and Ultramarine blue. This is the second try for this little guy. I thought he turned out pretty well, and he's sure in keeping with the weather we've been having lately! It's all the way up to -7 degrees Celcius today! Break out the sunscreen and flip-flops!

Well, here it is! My first post to my blog! I'll try to keep you updated on my new artwork and anything else that's going on. Here's my latest painting entitled "Polar Storm". This was completed using traditional watercolour paint over textured gesso. Kind of gives you a chill, doesn't it?