Experiments with Pink and Palette knives

Pink isn't my usual * says the girl wearing a pink shirt*

Blue is, unabashedly, my favorite color with which to paint. Blue or green have been my avowed favorite colors for a long time (which I know, because everyone asks you over and over throughout your life), and for a while there I was anti-pink.

I don’t know.

I have always loved fancy clothes and things that sparkle, but I was also into horses and swords and kids draw lines in weird places.

Anyway, sure sign of adulthood, I’ve mellowed. And accepted the face that dusty rose tones are, in fact, kinda my jam. I have dusky rose nail color, and a few dusky rose articles of clothing, and admit that my bedding all growing up was covered in dusky roses.

This piece…isn’t dusky rose pink. But one of those Find Your Joy art exercises was to use tools and colors you don’t usually. So I reached for pink.

Bright pink.

Pink palette knives and purple ink pencils

It’s not my usual, but I liked the experience. I really enjoyed palette knives, and got a surprising amount of joy from using my fingers to paint (the horse on the left). I discovered that I can put down a background and sketch something on top with an ink pencil. If I’m deliberate about the colors, the fact that the gouache reactivates when I wet the ink is actually a pro, and provides unity.

It doesn’t always work out. Like, the colors didn’t work the way I wanted on this piece. Something about it is…not soothing to look at.

This series of experiments went a lot better:

Colors more my jam, and that palette knife mane on the Clydesdale is just perfection. That background ended up being my favorite—but I know I got it from rubbing it against a couple of the other papers while in my background painting phase.

Abstracts

These I painted on vacation, just unplugged mentally and listened to a book and played. I’m pretty excited about how they came out, and wonder if I can do it on purpose sometime.