Painted Gourds-Part 3 Photos also-Field Project Photo

Dried gourds painted with tube acrylics.

Apologies to readers that looked at this blog post yesterday and could not see the photos.  The pictures were there when I posted the blog.  When I cam back to the blog this morning I could only see the captions.  It must be a problem with Google Drive because it would not allow the photos to load unless I uploaded them to Google Drive first.  Today when I went in to fix the pictures, the old method of loading photos to the blog was back in place.  Hopefully, the photos will stay in place this time.  Other than this paragraph, the blog is the same as yesterday.

Craft acrylics look chalky.

I have been painting on some of the gourds this week.  They took much more time to paint than I thought they would.  I ended up repainting one of them because I had used craft paints on it and it just looked chalky.  I have posted a picture of that gourd painted with the craft paints, but I am not sure if you will be able to tell that much difference over a photo uploaded to the internet.  The gourd that was repainted is the one in the front on the left.

1-12-2014

For these gourds, I was just trying to make them look something like they looked before they dried and turned brown.  Although some people think this type of gourd is ugly, I enjoy their colorful, bumpy shapes.  I really like their  bright colors and unpredictable patterns.  Nature is sometimes chaotic. 

Regular readers know that I other than just painting gourds, I am trying to experiment with various materials on these gourds to see what works well and what does not.  After doing some reading on the internet, I decided that I would follow one persons advice that the gourds should be covered in multiple layers of acrylic craft varnish before painting.  There was also much discussion on the web as to whether gesso should be used or not.  So, I painted one with gesso and tried it with only the acrylic craft varnish on one gourd.  I found that even after multiple coats of the varnish that when the gourds were painted with a fairly opaque (student grade) acrylic tube paints that you could still see spots and lines from the gourds showing through.  So if you are painting something and don't want the gourd's natural coloration to show through, you will probably want to use gesso.  The gourd with gesso had a much smoother color.

In the case of some of these gourds, I painted the entire gourd one color and then added the lighter color over it.  The lighter color required two coats.  That was annoying, but I don't think you save any time by painting the bumps the lighter color and trying to paint around it with the darker color.  I tried that with one gourd, and it did not go very well.  I kept accidentally brushing the color against the raised bumps, making a mess.  All the gourds were sealed with gloss varnish when the painting was complete.

I still have three gourds left.  For my experiment on those gourds I am going to use inks, which are supposed to work better than acrylic paints.  My results on those gourds will be in the next blog posts.

Sunday is photo day for my Field Project.  My plan is to take a photo of the same field from more or less the same position at the same time of day once a week to document it's changes over the course of the year.  There is a second component to this experiment.  For more details on that, please read my blog post from entitled Engaging Artificial Intelligence (Dec. 29, 2013).  Today's picture is the first day I have a picture of the field with sunshine on it.  The past three weeks it has rained on Sunday.  I was beginning to think it would be another rainy day photo because it has rained without stop for the last two days.  However, this morning the rain had cleared out.

So far, there has not been any animation of the field photos.  I had not really expected to see anything quite this early, but I have been checking my photos just in case.  There has not been much change in the field over the last three weeks.  And, since the photos have been on gray, cloudy days, it was hard to tell that it was not the same photo.  At least today's photo has sunlight and shadows.