Summer Fun, 6x9", Acrylic on watercolor paper, ©2012 Lucinda Howe

This week I’m continuing my series of small warm-up paintings based on whatever common object was in front of me in the studio.  These flip flops seemed to be the perfect symbol for the beginning of summer.

I found an old less-than-successful painting on watercolor paper that had been smeared with palette scrapings from previous sessions.  It had many unrelated colors in arbitrary streaks.  What a mess!  As Winston Churchill might have said, “it had no theme”.

So I cut it into several 6×9” pieces.  In this small section, the dominant color was blue.  I used its complement (orange) to paint around everything that didn’t look like flip flops, simplifying the background and allowing the underpainting to add pattern in a way I could not have designed on purpose.

Easy, breezy, summer fun!