Studio blog of Julie Galante – painting ridiculous things in Scotland
Way back in August, I had an exhibition called A Woman’s Place. It included around 40 paintings and mixed-media pieces of mine – probably the largest show I’ve ever done. There were several different themes running through the artwork, all having to do with woman and where we belong. At the very personal end, I … Read more
My husband died a month ago. I’ve been rather quiet online since then, busy with paperwork and grief and more paperwork (death brings so much paperwork, especially if you’ve lived in several countries). But sooner or later I want to reemerge – to continue to share my art and my thoughts and my writing, even … Read more
I’m still here, working through the exercises in my expressive drawing course. Overall I’m still really enjoying it. The exercises are confirming my love for working in mixed media on paper, so much so that it might be another month or two before I go back to oil painting. These first two images are experiments … Read more
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! I baked a pumpkin pie this morning and now the whole house smells like pie and I’m wondering how I’m going to keep myself from eating the pie before dinner tonight. This was an exercise in discipline, in a way. The idea was to build up the image using only ink wash … Read more
This was an exercise in adding and taking away using pencils, graphite powder, and erasers, leaving a history of mark-making on the page. I think I could have pushed it further, but I started to run out of daylight. I’ve found that I can work comfortably after dark with bolder materials such as ink and … Read more
For this one I used the exact same reference photos in the same configuration as my piece from two days ago. I almost ever do this, but I figure there’s probably a lot to be learned from repeating an exercise so closely. For this one I wasn’t happy with how faint the white ink was, … Read more
More experimenting with my new white ink today. As suspected, it’s not as obvious on white paper, even when layered into dark areas. It does add some nice subtle tonal variations in some spots, however. I should try it on a flat surface, where it will have the chance to pool instead of just dripping … Read more
Yay, new art supplies arrived today. I had made an order a while ago, but there were a couple things out of stock that finally got here. One of them was white ink, which I have never worked with before. To test it out, I decided to try the three faces exercise again. I used … Read more
Experiments in expressive portraiture today. I was especially trying to not make the two halves of the face symmetrical. I probably could have pushed it further – will work on this one some more and see what happens.
Playing around with ink today. Got the paper very wet and just experimented. This week I’ve learned that the two types of heavy-duty drawing paper I have respond very differently to wet materials. Tomorrow I’m giving a presentation about my work at the Edinburgh Art Fair. I’m pretty nervous about it, but optimistic that I … Read more