Paint Party Friday!

It wasn't a great painting week for me, but I was busy with other things and didn't do as much painting as I might have done otherwise.  I did manage to finish up my journal page:

I finished the daffodil, added the raindrops, finished painting the text and used a pen to add more text.  I had so much fun painting the color dots last week that I thought I'd include swatches of colors I used on the edge of my page.  I think I'll do that on each page from now on.  I'm happy with how it turned out.  I started sketching another page, but was having trouble with my sketching. 

I played around with color dots more this week, too.  Just using up some leftover paint.  By the bottom of the page I'd run out entirely.  I thought that text would be a nice addition to the blank space, so yesterday I added some.

I really want to play around with more painted text.  I've long admired the painted text in the book In and Out of the Garden by Sara Midda.  It's funny because I don't have the nicest handwriting, but that doesn't seem to bother me.  I enjoyed making the colors flow in the text on my journal page, but had less success with that on this blue painting.  I'll keep working on it.

I also worked some more on my peppermint geranium painting.  I added the stems, flower buds and a crinkled brown leaf.  I'd been thinking about how I wanted to paint the flowerpot and decided that I wanted to do some more experimenting with masking fluid.  I've only used it to mask out leaf veins so I wanted to see how it would work masking areas that had already been painted.  In some ways it worked well, but on a couple areas painting the masking fluid removed the paint.

This is especially apparent on the leaf near the bottom of the pot.  It had been a nice, dark green.  The whole point was experimenting and practice, so I can't be too upset.  I still need to paint the flowers and I should do some touch up.  In some ways I'd prefer to move on to other things, but the practice would be helpful and who knows, with a little more work I might end up really liking this painting.  I really like how a couple of the leaves turned out.  They have the velvety look that the real plant's leaves have.  Perhaps, eventually, I'll be able to make the paint do what I want on purpose instead of just by accident.