My Amateur Art & Photo Blog

Crab Nebular  A weekend trip to the local art store lead me to find some '2 for 1' deals on some small black canvases that as soon as I saw them I thought 'outer space'.  And finding something like this on sale gave me the confidence to experiment and try my first every Acrylic painting on canvas (outside of a Paint night event last year).   3rd Rock From The Sun Having only painted a couple of times previously, I was excited to see that these turned out so well that I wish I bought more of these little canvases while they were on sale. I did watch many many tutorials on how to paint a space scene before attempting these, and definitely feel like there's plenty of room for improvement but I had so much fun on such a small canvas and using a toothbrush dipped in white paint to flick on the stars was a great messy stress reliever. I would definitely recommend doing this to anyone feeling intimidated with larger canvas sizes.

I enjoyed painting with watercolors for the first time earlier this week but after watching some online videos I wanted to be more like Bob Ross so I thought I'd give acrylics a go. I purchased an inexpensive 'acrylic starters kit' that came with brushes, a palette, a plastic knife and some small samples of paper to get started with.  I felt like using the good 'canvas pad' paper was going to be a waste for my first attempt so decided to use 'sketch pad' paper instead which has the added benefit of being a small size for me to have less area to mess up having felt like I may have bitten off more than I could chew with the mountain country scene.  For today's exercise I thought I would try to replicate in paint one of my own photos, and one that I captured in Montreal. The great cathedral of Notre Dame which I thought had some great angles and I loved the aspect ratio, at least I liked it in the photo, I didn't like painting it much. There's a...