My Frida is getting some color! I was a little scared of choosing a color for the background, because it often dictates the whole mood of the painting. If you choose a light color, like gray or pale blue, it will give you a calmer vibe than if you choose a red or orange color.

Guess what color I decided to paint the background??

RED!

I like working in the floor when it's a larger piece because there is more space to place all the brushes and tubes of paint.

A good rule of thumb is to start with the bigger areas of your paintings and work your way to the smaller areas. In this case, I started with the background.  When working in large areas, I like to squeeze the paint directly to the canvas or wood and then work it in with a little help of an acrylic medium I learned the hard way that it's no good if you try to thin the paint with water because it can get really thin and you get more transparency that the one you were looking for. Acrylic mediums are really good to blend two colors together too.

When working with wood I can push the paint with an spatula and I don't need to worry about the canvas sagging. This makes it a lot more fun to blend different colors together until you get the one you want.

See those reddish tiles? This is my studio floor! I promise to get more pictures of my studio soon... (along with the gifts I've got in the mail!! So many things to write about and so little time!)

Here you can see the Frida silhouette. After I painted the red, I decided to add some pink and white and blend it into the red. You have to work fast because the paint dries in one minute or less! So you will be painting over the paint instead of blending the colors together. You can't really see it in this picture but the color is more pinkish than red.

This is a detail of the background. See those little bits of red and pink? I like the paint to have this visual texture instead of just being a single color. It adds depth and an interesting detail.

Now Frida is ready to get some color on her... I had to stop here because I realised I do not own black acrylic paint... need to buy black to paint her hair... will give you an update once I get that glitch fixed.