Tag Archives: painting

Folded Canvas Painting

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Hungarian born artist, Simon Hantaï, was an important figure in European art until his death in 2008. He spent most of his life in France, and was best known for his abstract work. His desire to move away from conventional methods of painting, lead to a process called pliage. Hantaï invented this technique, which involved folding and crumpling unstretched canvas, before adding bold and vibrant colours to it. This enabled him to continue exploring patterns and repetitiveness, present in his earlier work, while focussing on the importance of white space and the idea of chance.

This project is inspired by Hantaï’s pliage work, and very simply explores the idea of painting and creating art in a non conventional way, by scrunching canvasses and having fun.

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Filed under Artists, painting, Simon Hantaï

Spicing Up Your Legal Tender

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Brazilian artist and designer, Andre Levy, will change the way you look at coins. His creative interventions in Tales You Lose, involve embellishing and transforming heads of state into popular characters and people, leaving you wondering why you never thought of doing that yourself! It may also leave you curious about who is chosen to be on a coin, and about the legalities of altering money, even for non-fraudulent purposes like art. In this case, the acrylic paint you’ll be using can easily be scraped away, allowing you to continue using your coins as legitimate currency. But if you prefer to save the Queen of England sporting a new, hot pink coiffe, you can do that too.

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Filed under Andre Levy, coins, painting

Recycled House Paint Art

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Artist, Cassandra Tondro, has come up with a fabulous, fun way of recycling house paint. She gives it a second life by using it to make abstract art, while at the same time, helping the environment. She’ll also be inadvertently helping you to clear out that little corner where you store your paint containers, because I can’t be the only one who hangs on to the stuff, but rarely ends up using it.

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Filed under painting, recycling

Painted Hands

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The human body is an amazing canvas, which we adorn daily with both temporary and permanent expressions of who we are. Think makeup, hair dye, tattoos and piercings. Hands make a particularly cool canvas for kids, allowing them to easily paint their designs and bring them to life with motion.

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Filed under hand painting

Watercolour Painting With Salt and Glue

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There’s a very cool image making the rounds on Pinterest, from a blog called Chalk In My Pocket. It’s made using watercolour paint, glue and salt, and involves squirting, painting and sprinkling with the kind of freedom that kids love. It also makes you want to try it out yourself. While I’ve explored salt paintings before, adding glue, which acts as a resist, creates wonderful texture. And isolating small areas by cutting out shapes, opens up all sorts of possibilities.

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Painted Pages

Pages in old books, newspapers and magazines can provide beautiful canvases for painting. Tracking them down in yard sales and second hand shops is fairly easy, and with a little watercolour paint, they can be turned into something worthy of framing. I recently saw some beautiful examples in a store, and thought it was finally time to give it a try.

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Gerhard Richter Inspired Plexiglass Painting

Gerhardt Richter recently had a phenomenal show at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. This German artist has explored and mastered many styles including abstract, pop art, minimalism and photo-realism, where he creates paintings derived from photographs and adds his trademark blur. His work sells for prices higher than any other living artist, and is considered by many to be the most important working artist today. I loved his series of lacquer-on-glass paintings, and thought it would be interesting for kids to explore the idea of creating layers on plexiglass.

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Filed under Acrylic Mediums, Artists, Gerhard Richter, painting

Pareidolia

It sounds like a disorder of some kind, but it’s nothing more than the ability to see a cat in the cloud above. Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (usually an image or sound) being perceived as significant. In other words, when you see a little face in a light socket, an animal in a cloud, or a growling mouth in the front grille of a car, that’s pareidolia. It’s about the mind trying to make sense of the abstract, and it’s a great concept to explore with children.

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Graffiti Inspired Bottles

Years ago, one of my school assignments involved creating a collection of textile designs, and painting one of them on a household object. I chose a wine bottle because it was readily available, and surely considered a household object in France! This time, I thought a graffiti theme would be fun, and included the image above to show you my source of inspiration, which I found painted on a garage door. If lurking about back alleys isn’t your thing, the internet is filled with great images for you to consider using.

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Filed under glass, painting

Paint It White

The artist Niki de Saint Phalle, was a french painter, sculptor, and film maker. Today would have been her 81st birthday. Much of her work is naive in style, and has a playful, whimsical quality. The Tarot Garden in Italy is a perfect example of this, with its large scale sculptures covered in brightly coloured mosaics. So is the Stravinsky Fountain in Paris, filled with water-spraying sculptures made by Niki and her husband Jean Tinguely.

Of course it’s all much too happy looking for Halloween, but as luck would have it, she happened to create a unique looking assemblage called Portail de La Mort providing the perfect inspiration for this unusual, quirky little Halloween project. Trust me to sniff out one of the few colourless pieces she created! Joyeuse Anniversaire Niki.

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Filed under Artists, assemblage, Halloween, Niki de Saint Phalle