Behind the Scenes: Building a Painting in a Collection

Happy Friday Everyone!

This is a follow up post to "How I am Building an Art Licensing Portfolio". In that post I talked about painting a lot of icons. This photo post will give you a better idea of how I do it. No worries if you pull icons out of your finished paintings. I am sure there are as many ways of doing this as there are artists :-)

This collection is acrylic paint on canvas panel.  Click images to view larger.

Above are a few of the icons in my "Pumpkin Snow" collection. I scan in the finished icons so I can easily use them in a variety of situations for art on products.

I have scanned in the barrel. I chose the highest dpi that the scanner will allow me to choose. For this image that was 1,800 dpi. That means this barrel can be almost 3 feet in size at 300 dpi.  Now it is time to turn it into a painting :-)

I like to leave some space in the painting so I can add other elements in Photoshop for variety.

Love how the blue makes this pop!

Notice the barrel on the flag - fun to change it up!

How do you create art for licensing?

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Breaking the Rules - Do you?

 

When mixing color, I break these two rules - sometimes.

1. Don't use black in a painting.
2. Don't mix more than three colors together at a time.

The above two rules were taught in classes I took way back when. I see them pop up in art books & on blogs. I have done this when I paint with guache AND in the above pear palette knife acrylic unfinished painting.

Black was mixed in to get the darkest green you see above. There, I admit it. If you are new to painting, just use very small amounts of black at a time. It is a strong color and you won't need much when your are mixing. In other paintings, I have made a lovely mud out of several colors.

NOW, I think these rules are great. They help keep me from over mixing paint. Not using black can give a painting more interest and help to limit your palette.

Am I the only black-user-mud-maker out there?