I'm taking a new online class called Funky Little Cityscapes. The artist is Jodi Ohl, who does lots of colorful, whimsical paintings. When you look at her pictures up close, there are a lot of designs hidden in the paint. I never could figure out how she did that before taking this class.The first step was the strangest. You had to smear black paint onto the canvas with a credit card. Then you added some scribbles with watercolor crayons. It looked like a big picture of graffiti to me.
In the next step, you paint in the background - the hills and water and sky. She doesn't necessarily use traditional colors (like blue for the sky). You alternate paint washes with some stencil markings.
You use the watercolor crayons again to sketch in the houses and flowers. Since this kind of crayon washes away, it's easy to "erase" if you make a mistake (you just wipe it off with a wet paper towel). When you get everything where you want it, you color them in with acrylic paint. You also add some decorations on the buildings with stencils and stamps.
The final step was to outline everything with a black pen (it really makes the colors pop), and then you add highlights with a white pen. This painting took a lot longer to finish than I expected with so many different steps, but it is interesting to look at.
