Colour Melange Abstract painting, Day 11 of 30 paintings in 30 days

COLOUR MELANGE

30x40cm (12"x16") acrylic on panel

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Day 11 of Jan 2017 30 paintings challenge

Click Here to see Day 10's painting

Today's painting is on the other half of the mountboard from yesterday. I wanted to test out a flow improver I had but I have no idea how to use it. Normally I just spritz water on the acrylic and it flows nicely but the result can be result in very thin paint layers.

I mixed some colour with a bit of medium and added the flow medium. The mixture was very runny but when I put it on the support it didn't really flow. I laid it aside to let it dry and it took several hours to dry. If anyone knows how the flow medium should be used, let me know...

This is how it looked at that stage.

I mixed some yellow with gel medium and placed dollops of the mixture on the support using a pallet knife and stirred the paint. As a counterpoint, I made up a burnt orange mix and put that around the yellow.

I noticed that all the shapes were of similar size and increased the size of some of them I also took note to make sure the shapes were all different sizes and gave a good flow across. I contemplated it for awhile and thought it's too colourful. 

 

So what did I do? Added more colour of course. This time pinks. It started to look like flowers so I added more vertical ribbons of colour to suggest tendrils. This process went on for a while until the balance seemed right. Unfortunately I didn't take any more photos as the day became very grey.

The original background was still visible in between all the thicker paint and initially I was going to add paint and spritz it, but decided to use the left over gel mixtures and scraped them on using the knife, in no particular fashion to give a very thin layer of mixed colours. I scraped white over the central area to give it some relief from all the colour.

I don't think this is a success. I should have been bolder and made some of the 'flower' shapes much larger. At the moment it doesn't have much oomph and larger shapes would have made more of a statement. The bottom half also needs more work to bring it together.

A good starting point for another painting, and I have a couple of ideas how I can use this theme. What do you think I should consider to take this concept further?