Having spent half the day yesterday stamping, masking, stencilling and gessoing pear shapes as part of the GPP Street Team Crusades, I could not get the pear shape out of my mind. I already knew I would end up taking the shape onto canvas, but what I could not know as I cleaned up my mess last night, was that by the end of today I would have finished 2 16×16 canvas with – yep – pears on them!
With the one shown I started by masking out the words and the pear, then spray painting over the top in orange and purple. I use Plutonium G aerosol spray because it smells nice, has a lovely powdery matte finish and is CFC free so it is good for the environment. And besides, the c0lours have great names like Hot Sauce, Vegan and Manko. I fixed the spray paint, drew in the black lines and let thin black paint dribble down the canvas then added some swipes of thin black at the bottom. As the paint dried I dabbed it here and there with a tissue, taking the paint off again and leaving behind textural highlights.
I underpainted the pear, then re-sprayeed to get rid of some white gaps round the pear from the first spraying. I fixed it again (getting spray in my hair), splashed some black onto the canvas for a bit more texture and added a few more layers onto the pear. When the paint on the pear was nearly dry I scraped back into the paint to get down to the initial layers in some areas – these sort of glow through. Finally, I added some oil pastel here and there on top of the scratchings to really make the highlights sparkle.
For the record, my hands and arms tell the story; I have spray paint, ink, varnish and quite a few colours of acryclic paint on them – and to finish things off nicely, a little oil pastel under my nails!
some days I feel my job and its responsibilities more than others; or perhaps I started the day a bit tired anyway. Who knows … Anyway, what I needed was to relax once I had all my ‘chores’ out of the way. So I’ve 
had a play with acrylics, ink, pastels, oil pastels – just loosening up mentally and physically. Now it’s time to set breakfast out for the morning and head off to bed with a glass of water and a book on fused quilting.
Although I can do all kinds of things I suspect I have only scratched the surface of what can be done with Photoshop. Not that I am wanting to create digital art as an end in itself, more that I want to create things that I can use in my art that are solely my own work. That way there are no tricky copyright issues and that has to be a good thing, right?
Cath Sheard Art 