I’ve been talking about revisiting my original “Legends” series since I did that work and started to do so when I was putting together my entry in the “Paint By Red Wings Numbers” contest last winter (also called “Legends”) before hitting technical difficulties. Having solved those issues when working on some of my Ukrainian flag-inspired art, I decided now was the time to really get back to that.
While I was planning on revisiting my original idea anyway, this specific piece was created for my friend Jen, who requested a #13 for Pavel Datsyuk.
For the original series, I used various shades of red paint on a white canvas. In this one, the base is poured acrylics with a mix of reds, white, black, and blue to give it a marbled look. There’s also some silver and bronze in there but most of the shine comes from “metallic wine red,” which is quickly becoming one of my favorite colors to do this with.
To provide depth to the streaks (thrown onto the canvas using my power drill technique), I used not only white (Titanium White, to be specific) but silver and “Parchment” (which I kept incorrectly calling “Antique White” while I was working on it).
One other change I made in creating this is that I created the stencil using my wife’s Cricuit machine on removable vinyl instead of hand-cutting it out of heavy paper. This worked really well. It might have been overkill for something as simple as these numbers but it opens up options for more complicated stencils, which I’ll definitely be looking into.
One thing I think is interesting is how different it looks from a distance as opposed to close-up. The stencil outline becomes surprisingly more visible the further you are from the piece. I think this has less to do with the stencil itself and more to do with the marbling in the base but I’m not certain.
I really love this. It matches my original intent for my “Paint By Red Wings Numbers” submission and I really wish I’d figured all of this out several months ago. That said, this is an 8″ x 6″ panel, not a 24″ x 30″ canvas, so it’s possible it would lose something in the larger format anyway.
I don’t know if I’ll give that another shot because it feels repetitive. Maybe what I need to do is crank up an Etsy shop and make these on demand or something to make the repetition worth my while or something. That’s a problem for another day.
