Red Star Mandala

When I want to create but have little energy, I often turn to the free graphics editing program Sumopaint and make mandalas from images I already have on hand.

This mandala was created from a photo of a painting in progress (shown below).
I really love how the texture of the canvas itself shows up in this mandala and makes beautiful, feathery lines.

The painting in progress is small and simple so far. I'm enjoying the colours.

Golden Light
5"x7"
acrylic on canvasboard

Alien Spires Painting In Progress

I recently was given some canvasboard by my stepdad who no longer wanted his paintings.
I'm finding it really interesting how the way I paint is changed by having images by another person as an underpainting.
At first I thought I wanted to mask areas of his paintings and then have them showing through when my painting was finished... but it didn't look right to me.

You can see some of his original concentric circles showing through in this version. I have already added a coat of paint so the original colours aren't present but the shapes are:


One thing that was really excellent about this experiment was how my choice of colour was influenced by the previous painting. It led me to choose colours and combinations of colours that I wouldn't have normally. I like being stretched like this and I now have a greater appreciation for why some artists sometimes choose a 'pallette' and constrain themselves to it.

There are still changes I plan to make to this painting, areas and colours that I want to change, but for those who enjoy seeing parts of the process, here's how it looks now:

I'm still a bit frustrated by the way the blue 'tower' on the right appears to lean toward the left (rather than looking like the pink and gold shape is in front of it) but I think I know how to fix that by having a bit of it peek out from the lower left side of that shape.

I'm loving the glowing goldy colours (which are much gentler without the flash glare :)