Stay Warm (Unleash your Creativity)

Aptly named for the current weather situation in Montreal, 'Stay Warm (Unleash your Creativity)' deals with the subject of keeping your skills sharp even when it becomes a challenge to do so. The message is universal, but I got the idea from my own philosophy of painting, which is to keep painting all the time regardless of life circumstances. A common excuse by many artists is that they do not have enough time and that they will actually paint when they retire. There were times I felt like this too, but I solved it by lowering my expectations about what I wanted to accomplish in a single sitting. If I sit and paint for 1 minute, it is a whole lot better than not painting at all. In the painting, the woman on the chair is staying warm (creative) even though her front door is open, the snow is blowing in, her floor is turning into icicles, and strange creatures are celebrating the cold outside. A bonfire in the foreground keeps the cold at bay. How can you paint 'fire' with watercolour? It seems like a contradiction in many ways. The key is to create the illusion of fire, in other words, the illusion that there is a bright object emitting light. To start, the fire itself must be a very pale pink/yellow...generally the pink and reds go near the bottom of the flame and the yellow near the top. Then, add little dark red or even green highlights into the flame, this creates a contrast effect that makes the fire appear bright. Next, make a colour fade around the fire, look at the example in his painting and you see the light orange ground near the flame fading to a cool brown. Finally, plan to have objects near the fire that will appear to reflect the light from the fire. In this work you see the angel in the foreground with a thin highlight of bright pink on its wing, and the legs of a dancing ghoul with reflected yellow light depicted. For another good example check out 'Elemental Equation' posted April 2008. 

Stay Warm (Unleash your Creativity), watercolour 11 x 16" cold press, 2007 (No. 1769)