A little artistic diversion for a Saturday night

Saturday 7/30 was one of the Monrovia Association of Fine Arts' Art Walks. As part of the infotainment fellow artist member Heather Shaw and I teamed up for a painting swap-a-thon. A Swap-a-thon is a team painting where we take turns adding layers upon layers of paint to a canvas until we come to a final painting. The process takes a couple of hours and is fun for us as artists as well as entertaining and educational for those watching us on the sidewalk as we do our painting.

We don't work from a picture or a scene in the street. It is purely an exercise in painting from imagination. The final painting is always a surprise to us as one never knows what twists will take place when the swap takes place. Eventually you hit the zone where you are putting in final details and you are done.

Playing with paint brushes...

I'm intrigued by the variety of tools in paintbrush, specifically the "mixer brush" that allows you to pick colors from a background and paint on a new layer pick up "paint" or color from the underlying layer and mixing.

This image was worked with the mixer brush and using several different samples of color to fill in the sky and buildings for a painterly effect. I like these tools.

I think if I'm going to do anything bigger or more dramatic will have to invest in a tablet and stylus as doing this with a mouse is very tedious work.