My Unique Three Step Painting Process

Since so many of you are interested in the process of how I create my paintings, I thought I would post a little explanation:) First I begin a basic drawing and watercolor painting. Starting out as a water colorist, this simply helps me to organize my thoughts onto paper. For example, what colors I want to use and the composition of the painting. All of my mixed media paintings are done on cold press Arches watercolor paper. ~ I then add the tissue paper with an artists glue. I always rip the tissue paper rather than cut it as I think it adds more of an organic feel. The tissue paper not only adds texture to the painting, it also adds a balance of color and helps in rounding out the composition of each piece. With all of my paintings, the tissue paper is added over the flower stems, placed as grass and sprinkled through-out the painting. At this point I feel the painting starts to come into its own. ~ The last step is applying the pastel. I feel that this is the most important step as the pastel really brings a vibrancy and texture that any other medium could not do. For me, this is where the fun begins. Pastel is very forgiving and believe it or not light colors completely cover dark colors (the opposite of watercolor) so I can play around and have lots of fun. I usually start by painting over the tissue paper grass which tends to be a mixture of three to four colors. I then paint the flowers, rarely mixing more than three colors per flower. Next is the back ground and sprinkled pieces of tissue paper. The back ground is always a guess for me as to how it will turn out. I've mixed anywhere from two to ten different colors in a back ground before while painting the sprinkled pieces of tissue paper at the same time. Overall, I really never know how a painting is going to turn out. They do tend to take on a life of their own and often I have no idea how I got from the vision I had in my head to what the final piece looks like. However, the example I show here looks very much like how I had intended it to be. Well, that's my unique three step painting process. If you have any questions feel free to email me!