Here's a practical example of how I take an idea and turn it into a textured artwork.
As you might know, the main theme behind my artwork is nature - especially Finnish nature. That's where I draw most of my inspiration. And today, I wanted to show you how that initial spark of inspiration turns into a finished painting. For context, I'll use my Fall Foliage painting as an example. It's one of my more popular, colourful works. I've created four variations of it so far, and it also inspired the upcoming Four Seasons set.
The original idea came to me on a simple walk in the woods with our dog in early autumn. The sun was shining with a beautiful golden glare. On the path, there were two trees that had already turned completely yellow, whereas the others were still lush green. I loved that contrast, and wanted to turn it into a textured painting.
I took a photo (which you see here), and when I returned to my studio I started planning. There were three elements I wanted to capture from the scene: movement, depth and colours.
For movement, I wanted the painting to resemble the idea of falling leaves. For depth, I wanted the painting to feel like a deep, lush forest. And of course with the colours, I wanted to capture the beautiful palette of the fall foliage (which is my favourite time of the year).
The sense of movement was achieved with brushwork and textured patterns. The background consists of several layers of acrylic paint, applied in short strokes that mimic falling leaves. These layers also helped build up the sense of depth I was after. As colours, I used a range of reds and yellows on the top part, and greens on the bottom.
Similarly with the textured patterns. I coloured the texture paste directly with the acrylic paints, and applied the textures to resemble the movement of the falling leaves. To make the artwork feel even more organic, I used different sized palette knives and made some of the petals imperfect. Some of the textures were layered on top of each other, to further create the sense of depth. The multitude of different background colour layers brushed in short strokes followed by several textured layers in a similar pattern created the sense of depth and movement I was going for. That's how Fall Foliage came to life.
I've then created several different versions of the Fall Foliage for clients around the world, and am currently working on a set of four paintings (titled Four Seasons) inspired by it.It was also the inspiration behind the Autumn Leaves textured art painting (pictured below) I teach in my online course.
