Welcome to day twenty-six in the 33 Paintings in 33 Days Project of Alaskan artist  Nikki Kinne and Wisconsin artist Helen Klebesadel.

Nikki and I were honored yesterday to have this project featured in the Meylah Marketplace Blog.   As you may know I have been posting my paintings from this project in my Meylah storefront daily after this blog posts.  The  Seattle-based Meylah is a relatively new ecommerce platform for artisan and creative products. Through personalized storefronts that integrate blog technology really well, Meylah offers thousands of items for sale internationally including handmade, digital, fine art, and photography products and tutorials.  What sets Meylah apart from its well known competitor, Etsy (where I also have a storefront), is the format, and the fact that while there is a modest monthly fee for a store there are no transaction fees for the seller.

My 26th day is inspired by my earlier sketches of the north woods of Wisconsin but I used a base image as an excuse to play with the spontaneity of the watercolor.  This wet into wet image started with me wetting parts of the image and dropping in the dominant color and then allowing the colors to mix freely.  Next I dropped salt into the sky and alcohol into the hill to create these wonderful textures.  I had retained dry areas in the shape of the rhythmic line across the hilltop.  After the sky and hill were completely dry I went back in and painted the yellow and red rectangles to complete a dynamic composition.

For her 26th painting of our 33 Nikki gathered a bouquet of Delphiniums from her yard and brought them to her studio to paint.  Nikki is an expert at painting on Yupo paper.  Its a non – absorbent surface that allows you to re-wet the paint and wipe back to the surface.

She says of creating this work, ” I usually paint flowers light and the background dark.  I’m glad I had used Yupo paper for today’s painting.  The flowers got lost in being the same value as the background.  So, I re-wet the background and pulled lots of the paint up off of it.  What excited me about this, plan to do more exploration of, is the wiping energy in the background that almost makes the flowers seem to be moving. ”

Its beautiful Nikki!

Thank you for joining us on this adventure of sharing.

I am now making my daily works for this project available for sale online in my Meylah shop here: http://meylah.com/HelenKle​besadel  I post them each day after they are posted in the blog.