Ellen Jean Diederich Studio

The watercolor on the the left is titled “The Fargo Blues” the Acrylic on canvas on the right is titled “City Scape 2010″ I hope you enjoy these two paintings.

In the past I used a variety of under-paintings in my watercolors.  I decided to experiment with them in Acrylic.

These two paintings both employed a grid as an under-painting.  An under-painting   is simply overall design plan balanced in the simplest way possible tying the finished painting together.  In “The Fargo Blues”(left), a painting done using watercolor,  the gridded under-painting is more obvious due to the transparency of the medium.  In “Cityscape 2010”(right),a painting done with acrylic, the opaque paint can completely blocks out the grid.  As you can see, the different mediums with the grid technique can form a completely different look and feel to each painting.

There was a little surprise with my “Cityscape” under-painting.  To first step to starting this painting was to apply very thick gesso was applied with a piece of mat board in a grid like pattern.  Since the acrylic under-painting would be covered up,  I used intense color and smeared them on to the grid shapes.  Soon I realized I couldn’t see my pencil drawing.   So I redrew it using a sharpie marker instead.  I painted around the windows first and suddenly had very dramatic reflections.  My family was at the lake with me and they all started telling me not to cover “that” up. What do you think?

Hi there,

I have been so busy painting ,ordering frames and matts for the upcoming exhibitions.  I have the 8th Street Fine Art Show & Sale on 8th Street in Fargo, July 7- 8 “Wednesday- Thursday” 11:00 to 7:00.  This isto  followed by the Downtown Street Fair in Fargo the 15-17.  Anyhow I have finished  some beautiful watercolors  and am working hard to pull together and reveal my first acrylics.  I don’t know at this point if I will show any but  I’m pretty sure I will.    I’m a bit unsure of myself as I keep learning new things as I go and suddenly a small change can throw everything.  It frankly surprises me as it is so  much easier to cover up something  with acrylic versus watercolor .  However, in my acrylics the brushwork is really on display as I love the freshness of it.

I am working on the following paintings.  White Daisies, Zinnias, Belgian Horses, and a vegetable garden.  So far the mos likely to succeed are the Daisies and Belgians.  I did finish today the most fabulous watercolor of Dinnerplate Dahlias.   I recommend you stop by and see it while you can

Well I went wild with the Zinnia painting.  I guess I needed an attitude adjustment about the gold gesso.  It was so pretty  and I kept trying to expose some of it, only to nearly destroy it with destructive attachment behavior.  It seemed like a duh. Their are some basic of building up paintings that need to be thought of differently in a different media. Nor does acrylic paint  blend itself easily like watercolor and their are  different time expectations for specific areas.  I will slow down as  I got impatient.  Currently,  my background on my Zinnias is all wild and messy and way too loud but it is a   new point to work from.  I detached from and nearly covered all of the gold.

Acrylic and watercolors require entirely different timing in more ways than I ever knew. I now understand why I have been so busy discovering grounds to paint on. Large areas of paint see to require significant more attention despite needed  simplicity.  In response to this knowledge,  I started another ground to work on.  This time applying Utrect heavy gesso with a piece of mat board on top of a primed canvas.  I moved it and scratched it with a stick for texture.  When that was dry I rubbed my under-painting into all the crevices.  I was especially excited to realize, as I looked through my sketch books,  that my subconscious mind  said “this would be good in acrylic”.   It felt like a breakthrough as I haven’t been seeing my work in my mind with acrylic as of yet.  So today I’m working on drawing this piece out  and  continuing on the wild and messy zinnias.

Good news! I did  finish an acrylic of Belgians and really like it.  Now I have to learn how to sign my name in this media.  Also I’m working on a beautiful watercolor of pink Dahlias.  So far it’s “scrumptious” plus it was relaxing to be more familiar with my painting techniques.

One of my favorite flowers to paint is a Zinnia.    I have been working on canvas with a gold gesso ground.  Everyone coming into the studio admired the varieties of fuchsias I have put in the flowers to the point they are all telling me they like it with just that.  Of course it looks more like fabulous wallpaper now than art.   I have been an advocate for strong stems and support for flowers.  All this commentary put fear of completion into it.  Then last week when I was getting my hair colored I saw an advertisement with a variety of pinks, reds-violets and a gold background with just a small area of green.  I believe I can now live with enlarging the main flowers to balance the colors similarly.  Here I go!

6 /1/2010

I haven’t written for some time.  I was busy taking a Golden Products workshop where we experimented with a wider variety of mediums and grounds in acrylic paint.  It was very informative and I recommend this to anyone interested in the acrylic medium.

Regarding grounds, I found there were a few I really liked.  Soft Molding Paste is light weight paste that can be shaped with a palette knife on a canvas or board.  I preferred it over hard-molding paste which is less flexible and ads considerable weight to the canvas.  Then we prepped the surface it with an under-painting of 10 parts water to one part paint.  I found it fascinating.  I also mixed it with Micacous iron oxide (a very dark grey ground) and textured it on with a random surface.  I had less time to finish this piece and believe the scale of the work was too small for me…but promising. I am also working with Utrecht extra-heavy -gesso (not a Golden product).  It holds its shape when you scratch through the surface.  Instead of painting on the surface I used a rag to apply and rub color into the indents in the gesso for the under-painting.  Apparently acrylics have a strong ammonia in the paint which like soap,  foams if you work thinly with water and churn it up with your brush.  Having an under-painting to choose from is a fun way to work with the paint.  I will discuss some others when I’m a little farther along.

I discovered that I love working with a flat brush with the liquid acrylics with soft gel or gel medium.  I also like the heavy bodied acrylics as they have more texture.  Apparently there is a new paint called open designed to dry slower –suggested to be good for outdoor painting.  I found I have no desire to make the paint dry slower as I can keep upon building at a pace that it is drying.  I have been working on smaller samples however, so it may change on a big surface.

Through all of this was exciting as I saw how I can use some of my edge techniques naturally by applying color instead of leaving the under-  painting exposed “on objects in particular” .  This doesn’t affect my style but gives a unique difference between my watercolors and my acrylics.    I am excited that I am making progress and will continue working.

I am working on the Lilies again in watercolor today.  The painting displays a mass of yellow lilies accented by red violet cone flowers.    This is tough as I want to make them stand out as the center of interest yet there is little contrast among the yellow flowers.  I plan to use tiny patterns of greens  or violets to intertwine the yellows and define the flowers. I believe the outside contour of the mass is the most important shape to maintain for this idea.

These Belgians were painted on canvas that I simply used up pigments to cover the white surfaces. For this paricular painting I painted the colors floating onmy watercolor pallete for inspiration.

So far, my experiments with canvas have me struggling at the very beginning. I don’t know how much of this is fear based.  Due to the fact that I had a booth at the New York Art Expo in March, I found my early attempts with acrylic on canvas to amateurish to debut there. I needed to have some new works, put acrylics on hold and went for the watercolor.  So now I am working with canvas again…and watercolor too.

First I tried to create inspiring under-paintings to paint on top of.  A wonderful oil painter at the Uptown Art Fair suggested I just paint some bright colors onto canvas and then I would be rolling.  I did this and wasn’t rolling – not her fault of course.   So then I used some of my watercolor under-painting ideas.

First, I took photographs of my watercolor palette and other pictures and painted a related simple pattern covering the surface. I found I had all this leftover, expensive paint and started madly covering other surfaces so as not to waste it.  I think I would have been better to do studies to use it up…but that takes time and thought when you are closing up the day, there wasn’t enough time left.  I will put something like that into my time plan.   Anyhow I have several colored canvases to work on.  I tried to make one of them really bright to paint pastel roses on… it makes my stomach churn when I look at it.

I also covered one with some beautiful gold gesso. I started arranging zinnia shapes onto the canvas.  Two people have told me how oriental it looks.  My daughter just told me she would like me to do just that to a wall in her house when she has one.  I’m not going for a wallpaper line but at least it wasn’t discouraging.  I am going to work on it some more right now and probably cover up a lot of the gold. How the textures in the paint form the petals is beautiful.