Saturday in the Studio - Week 17

Good morning and welcome to Saturday in the Studio with me, Helen - Helen Alice Johnson Artist. If you haven’t seen my weekly video blogs before, then, each Saturday I take you for a quick whiz around my studio to show you what I’ve been up to! I have been working some more on the diptych based on The Walled Garden at Sunbury on Thames. I’ve been working on it for a couple of weeks now and I’m going to share with you what I’ve been up to this week.

One of the first things I did this week was to use my phone again. If you watched my video last week you will have seen that I use my phone to manipulate an image which I then transfer to the canvas, which you can see I’ve done here with the white crescent shape on the left of the left canvas.

Photo with Iphone editing

Original painting with detail after using Iphone editing

Carrying on with the same theme, I’ve added an extra pink circle to the bottom right hand border of the right painting to help create a better balance.

Photograph of painting manipulated on Iphone

Original painting with added pink circle in bottom corner

I’ve also added more detail this week - I’ve added detail and colour to the orange tree and the purple tree

Orange tree detail

Purple tree detail

Another area of the painting that I wasn’t happy with was the blue lines on the right hand painting of the diptych. I put them in originally because they formed the kind of grid shape that I was interested in but actually in looking at them, just visually as a painting they didn’t work, so I’ve worked over them to create something more open and fluid.

In taking the blue lines out, at first I replaced the left hand side line with a thicker green band but that still didn’t work and so I’ve taken that line out as well as you can see in the photos below

Original painting with the blue lines still in

Original painting with green band

Beginning to remove the green band

With the green band removed other than the pink circle

So I hope you’ve enjoyed that ‘walk around’ and seen how with abstract paintings it can really be a bit of a challenge to get composition right so that you don’t have an imbalance and just moving one colour of paint to a different area can make a huge difference.

I’ve nearly finished this painting now, and it will be coming back to the UK with me and will hopefully be on display and for sale at The Old Cinema in Chiswick. Thanks for your support.

Best wishes,

Helen Alice