I’ve been working on this painting very sporadically for at least 6 months. I finally put the clear coat on it a few days ago:
The wood that this painting is on is actually a project I did years ago, for a different house with a different dining room. Check out what it use to look like here. Matt and I had both really wanted some type of big bold looking pop art in the dining room but had a hard time finding one we liked. Pop art is cliche, the bold primary colors, the simplistic style, I love it but any print that instantly makes you say it’s pop art has to remind you of what you’ve seen before. I found this print from Deborah Azzopardi (check out her website here) that I really liked it but when I first found it, it was out of print.
However, I see on allposters.com it is avaliable again. I wanted to make my own, large painting based on this print. I started with a rough oil pastel sketch based on the scale of my wood piece:
I thought originally that I wanted to mimic the comic book primary colors typical of this style. I started with bright blue, true red and a very primary yellow but after repainting all the colors dozens of times (not exaggerating) I landed on a more modern color palette.
To do the outlining I tried out some paint markers, which I had never used before.
I had tons of fun using the pens, the only hard thing was how sticky the paint was as it dried. If I tried to go back in to a line before the paint was dry it would pull up the drying paint. I decided at the last minute the pink needed to be brighter and ended up having to re-line all the pink areas.
Here it is with the brighter pink, in my basement where you can barely tell:
I loved the new pink, and the first day the temperature was over 50 I took it outside to clear coat it. It was a total disaster, probably since it was so big no matter how slowly and evenly I sprayed the acrylic coat on it looked blotchy. I was really worried that I would have to sand or repaint or throw it on the scrap pile, but I bought a can of water based poly and painted it on.
To my immense relief it worked beautifully. Here it is again all finished waiting for a frame: