Get Your Paint On- Week Three

This week, our assignment was to pick four (I cheated, and only picked three) objects from our life, and match their colors in our painting. 

I chose my three kids' "lovies":  Riley's puppy, Noah's giraffe, and Avery's blankie.  The chairs in the painting are the paints I mixed.  In reality, they match a little better than the photo shows, but they also dried a bit darker than the mixed paints. 

 One light bulb moment for me this week was Mati and Lisa's recommendation to never use paint straight from the bottle.  They recommend always mixing your paints to get more complex colors.  While I can't say that I followed that 100% this week, it did really affect the way I used my colors, and I did a lot more mixing than I usually do.  They did an interview with Matte Stephens this week, which further cemented those ideas.  His pallette is SO AMAZING- I look at his work, and think my colors look so amateur-ish comparatively!

Anyway, this piece took a while to come together.  I'm really wondering about my use of the arches.  I can't tell if I use the shape as a fall-back or not.  But they just feel so "right" to me, that it's hard NOT to use them.  And I sort of feel like I haven't completely explored them to their fullest yet. 

What I'm enjoying is using some of the more geometric shapes in combination with the organic shapes of the arches.  This is new for me, so I'll play with that for a while...

Okay, that's all. Avery's banging on the porch door with a golf club, so guess I'd better go attend to my kids!!