Sometimes the best ideas…aren’t.

For my last painting I wanted to add some bokeh (out-of-focus blurs / light spots) in the painting. I had succeeded in doing this once and was hoping to repeat the lovely effect.

After two weeks of patiently painting the grapes, I applied gum arabic in strategic areas in the painting in the shapes of circles. Then I painted the blurry background to the left and small sections on the right.  So far so good I thought.  Then I applied water to remove any paint where I had applied the gum arabic and was disappointed.  Although the gum arabic created lovely soft edges, the circles appeared completely out of place.   

Here is what it looked like.

Two things had gone wrong in my planning.  First the grapes already create sufficient circles and the bokeh appeared as floating grapes. Secondly, the bokeh were almost the same size of the grapes. Had they been larger, maybe this idea would not have been such a failure. If the other two factors could have been mitigated, maybe the addition of colours to the bokeh would have made them tolerable.

Luckily, I scrubbed out the gum arabic and was able to reapply paint and the ugly spots are no longer detectable.  Here is the final painting.

It's very rare to have a painting go well from start to finish, therein lies some of the challenges and fun.

Have a great week,

Danielle