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Following the prompt on page 115 of our journal: Pick a window in your home. Draw what you see looking out of it.

The camera lengthened the space visually. It is much more compact in real life. I liked the depth and want this in the painting.

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Materials:

Ampersand 12 x 16” Beech panel with 1 ½” cradle. Check carefully for cracks or dings before taking off plastic.

Liquitex Acrylic Marker 2-4mm

Carbon Black, Cadmium Yellow Deep and Cadmium Red Light

Liquitex Acrylic Marker 8-15mm Carbon Black

Liquitex Heavy Body Acrylic Cobalt Blue, Brilliant Blue, Cadmium Red Light, Brilliant Yellow Green, Burnt Sienna, Transparent Mixing White

Tape, Scissors, Bubble wrap, brushes, water, paper towel, New York Times Magazines

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Left side:

Straight from the pen or tube.

Right side:

Mixed on the page with transparent white.

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His art inspired Hofmann students to move from abstraction to figurative art. This lovely painting uses both one-point perspective and push pull theory in one painting.

The colors are gorgeous, and they are very similar to the paints I selected or this project.

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Tape the sides and make sure the tape is securely on. You want to leave the wood pristine to hang on walls without framing.

Brush on a coat of clear or white gesso. Sand lightly and add a second coat. If using oil paint, apply gesso a third time.

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Measuring one third of the 16 inches, and using the magazine as a straightedge, brilliant yellow green was directly brushed on.

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Left the texture of the brush thinking about grass in the spring and how bright and happy it looks.

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Brushed cobalt blue on the rest of the panel. Used bubble wrap to create an activated horizon line. The green was dry.

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Folding the paper once lengthwise, and once again, creates a stencil that has the feeling of paper dolls. I drew with scissors looking out the window. Regular copy paper didn’t fare well as a stencil. Coated magazine pages are best. Yellow shape is construction paper. That works too. The possibilities with this technique are endless.

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Looking out the window, I placed the stencil in the blue and painted the whole area with brilliant blue, lifting the stencil just after painting so it didn’t stick to the surface.

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Seeing how the blue interacted with the lower rectangle of ocher and dark green, I transposed the idea to my own color palette. You will see in the next step.

Why stencils?

I have using them for figurative painting and collages since we taught Matisse.

It is a very different edge than a brush or palette knife.

I like the repetitive possibilities.

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Steps:

Let the stencil dry before using again.
Placed the stencil to the left and below its first placement.
Mixed brilliant yellow green and brilliant blue in equal amounts.
Covered the brilliant yellow green in the lower third of the panel with the new color.
This makes two horizon lines; one where the brilliant blue meets the cobalt now pushing backward, and the mixed yellow-green/cobalt pushing forward.

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Current incarnation:

The diamond shape in the middle moves in and out, and the bubble wrap imprint feels fresh. The viewer doesn’t think “Oh, that’s bubble wrap.”

Acrylic dries much faster, as you know, than oil paint, so I did a lot more color/compositional planning than usual, staying open to a different way of working than my usual modus operandi.