A Handy Tip For Beginning a Painting

Thankyou for your lovely comments about the changes I made to my vase painting. It seems I did the right thing! :)
I've started a new painting. This one's done in a similar way to the 'Broadsands Baby' painting I made last week. Because I had a good idea of how I wanted the painting to look, I began by drawing the the main shapes of the image in pencil onto the canvas.

When I began to paint over the pencil lines, I realised that the paint would become mixed up with the graphite of the pencil, making it muddy. I know at this stage many of you would spray it with fixative but I find it quite expensive and don't have any.

What to do?

Cover the areas you want to protect with tissue paper glued in place! It's so see-through that the layer underneath can still be clearly seen. I used pink tissue paper here but if you prefer, use white tissue if you don't want to add colour at this stage.

Once dry, (I used a hair dryer to speed things up) you can easily paint over all these areas without any pencil being disturbed at all. :)

(cropped close-up)

I painted a lot of the areas in detail but left other areas with the collage elements showing. Although I love artists who make detailed precise work, with my own painting I don't feel right tightening up the whole painting, I like to leave some areas for the viewers' imagination.

So here it is, the finished painting, complete with jewellery and cakes.

I'm calling this one 'Chocolate and Cherry' and it measures 30 x 40cm (12 x 16inches)

It's been very stormy and dark the last couple of days so I haven't been able to photograph it properly yet but when I do, I'll list it for sale in my Etsy shop at £80 (other currencies welcome!) :) If you'd like to buy it before it gets listed, or have any questions, please message me here on the blog or email me. :)

I hope you're not affected by these awful storms, it's very bad here at the moment in the south west but my house isn't near the coast, no we don't have really bad damage like the Dawlish trainline that collapsed this morning!

Keep safe xx

**UPDATE**

Now available to buy here. :)