Thursday, February 28, 2013

How to find cards they haven't already seen

(click on image to enlarge)

Cobalt Lake in incongruous arrangement
Watercolour card
©2013 Charlene Brown

By 'they' I think you know who I mean – those people who have a knack for finding the perfect, appropriate and/or beautiful birthday card every time. What kind of a card do you send them when they’ve obviously seen every known birthday card in the course of finding the one they just sent you… Well, you paint one of course.
Cobalt Lake is one of four stylized versions of larger paintings that I painted on 12.7 x 17.4 cm blank cards. Two of them were masked using Masquepen™ and taped to a board in the folded position, as shown on the right.  (I learned not to tape the cards down flat in a previous experiment.)
The two others were painted with only the back of the card taped to the board, and masked with oil pastel. They flapped around quite a bit under my brush, resulting in an especially casual style.  And they still need some work.