Posts tagged oil pastel

Ever since I found this watercolor pad at the odious Hobby Lobby store I’ve been in love. This pad is 140 lbs. And only 6” square, which motivates me to actually finish my drawings. When I was a teen, I always wanted to do album covers for the music business. Well, now that there is neither any such thing as a music business nor album art, this pad which is slightly larger than CD jewel box, lets me at least pretend that I have fulfilled my dream. All of the homages I’ve done, some of which are seen on my Big Brown Sketchbook blog, have been done using this pad. Strathmore has some square format watercolor pads that are larger, 10” square. A that size is more taxing on my attention span. I’m going to search around to see if there’s a 6” size from them. And did I mention that size is scannable?

Believe it or not I photographed this outside in the full 5:00pm sun! I think this is how I’ll leave my postcard. Just needs signing, which I’m still experimenting the best way to do it. This far the only thing that’ll take well is if I sign it using a thin watercolor brush and white acrylic paint. I’ve tried everything from metallic Sharpies to ball points and gel pens. The oil pastels clog everything, which probably means I need to let my drawings set a day or two before I sign them and bring them to market!

I’m going to try to put a coat of varnish on it - something like Mod Podge - to protect it. It is an actual, useable post card. Below is the back of it:

I doubt I’ll ever actually use it as such though. I got the idea from a friend who sent me a postcard with an actual painting on it from her widow. I thought it an INCREDIBLY wonderful and personal gift, 

Size-wise it’s not that much smaller than the ones I’ve been doing on the 6x9 sheets of watercolor paper, especially after I mask off an inch on each side, which I usually do with the blue painter’s tape. All I do on those is cut my 9x12 pad in half. My pieces that I have prints of on sale at  Fine Art America: Night School, Sunday in the Park are on 6x9s - quite small. It’s somewhat amusing that I can potentially sell prints of them that are about 6 times the size of the original! I think they do better as cards. You can check them out if you like: http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/iris-gross.html