St. Johns Barn - acrylic on canvas

I had such fun painting my 6x6 tile with acrylics, so I decided the same scene might even work with a small acrylic canvas. Pastels are still my passion but I have also been fascinated by acrylics ever since I saw the demo done by Ellen Diamond at one of our Art Guild meetings. I really wanted to take her one-day workshop that she ran for Art Guild members, and signed up for it. But when I priced out her supplies list for the workshop it would have cost me $200-300 just to buy her required supplies! That was a lot of money just to try something out to see if I liked it! So I canceled out of the workshop.

But in the meantime I had bought a few acrylics and a few small 8x10 canvases. I think one thing I like about pastels is working directly with my hands on the support, and one thing I dislike about acrylics is using a brush. I just don't enjoy using a brush! But at the very least the Ellen Diamond demo suddenly made me realize I could use my hands to put on acrylics too! Why not? There are no rules that say you must use a brush, right? It just had never occurred to me that I could use my fingers with acrylics too.

So that's what I did on a great deal of this painting. It was a lot of fun doing this scene again for the third time.

St. Johns Barn - acrylic on tile

The Art Guild of Orange Park suggested a summer project for all the members. They provided a bunch of rough tiles, either 6x6 or 4x4 inches, and asked everyone to paint a tile. You could even paint more than one of you wanted. They'll be brought to the first meeting in September.

I took a 6x6 tile, but of course could not use pastels on it! That would only be a mess. So I pulled out the small number of acrylics I have. I decided the same scene I had done yesterday in pastel, for the 5x7 painting exchange, would also work well on the 6x6 tile. It was another rainy day today, so I worked on this painting this morning. It was fun. Maybe I'll have to get another tile or two to paint. :-)

St. Johns Barn

It's funny how there are so many different Floridas. I love St. Johns County, where St. Augustine and Guana River and Fort Matanzas are located. Those are all along the coast, with lovely beaches, and palm trees. Also many tourists, and tourist destinations. It looks more like the tourist literature Florida. But you only have to get a few miles inland to see a totally different Florida.

This painting is from that very different Florida. If you come home to my house from Fort Matanzas you can cut inland at route 206, then take 305 up to 13A, before connecting back to route 13 and then over the Shands Bridge. Along that route you find yourself in the middle of nowhere! Well nowhere that most tourists would venture. It's very rural countryside, mostly farms. Pine trees, not palm trees. You drive along and see miles of pine trees, cattle, corn fields, barns and tractors and farm houses. Oddly, it reminds me a lot of the countryside near my summer home in New Brunswick, Canada.

This coming Saturday we have our final meeting before the summer break of the First Coast Pastel Society and we are all supposed to bring in a wrapped 5x7 painting and have a painting exchange! It sounds like fun, but of course I had no paintings available as I never work in a small 5x7 size, so I had to paint a picture for the exchange.

I ended up doing one of this barn I saw along route 305. The sun was glinting on the roof, and I liked the feel of it. I liked the idea of doing a painting of this "other" Florida also.

We are being bombarded with rain today from Tropical Storm Beryl, so it's not a day for traditional outdoor Memorial Day activities. So I sat in my kitchen and looked out at the rain on my pond, and painted this from a reference photo I'd taken.

It's done on UArt paper, the first time I've ever tried it. It worked well and held quite a bit of tooth.