I have signed up for an on-line lunchtime course on finger painting. This is largely because I was so taken by the Richard Long finger print pieces in the exhibition on here in Bristol on his work.
I have enjoyed it so far, although I am way behind, because it has made me do things I don’t normally do like painting flowers. The point is to do it with your fingers and only your fingers, and to paint them from life. I suppose it was a bit presumptuous of me to start with sunflowers. Van Gogh has rather cornered the market. I bought a small bunch and had a go. I used very heavy watercolour paper as I knew the substrate was going to get a lot of punishment. This combined with a light touch trying to get all the wispy bits round the edge of petals led to some frankly uninteresting stuff:
The only interest in these is that they have a faintly fifties textile print charm to them. As I became my usual heavy-handed self and used a lot more paint, the results got a bit better:
Finally, I painted the whole background first and this allowed the paint to go on more easily and made it a bit more controllable:
I quite like the result here, but it looks like a sunflower rather than this sunflower, the one in front of me.
I don’t think that these are particularly great, but they do show some experiments, and I think it’s good to share your mistakes and false starts as well as your successes and final polished pieces.
love your finger painting, very freeing after a while- we are so stifled by convention
And trying to make things look like art. This was really good fun – just playing about with paint.
Interesting results! Finger painting would be way outside my comfort zone, I must admit 🙂
I really did do it for the Richard Long connection, but I found myself enjoying it more than I thought.