The Artwork of Stephanie Spangler

This month I kept busy doing the annual Gouachetober challenge. You can check it out on my Instagram page here. For those of you who may not know what that is, gouache (pronounced GWASH like squash) is a unique type of paint that works like watercolor but also has properties like acrylic paint. You can activate it with water and get a very thin, watercolor effect or you can paint it on more thickly and get an opaque look, like acrylic. Either way, it helps if you do not l

Well, sometimes things work out exactly the way you planned them and other times... not so much. Art can be a lot of trial and error sometimes and this past weekend I experienced that while trying to experiment with the new fluid acrylic paints I received for Christmas. You may have seen pictures or videos all over the internet of people making pour paintings - paintings where you literally pour a bunch of different colored paints on a canvas and move them around by tilting

Well, here we are at the end of the challenge and while I enjoyed it... I am glad it's come to a close. Some days it's been flat out exhausting trying to get a day's challenge done, but it was fun stretching myself and trying new things. Today's challenge did exactly that. I tried a new technique which was a form of flow painting that involved blowing the paint across the canvas with a straw. I mixed acrylic paint with water, to make it easier to spread, and dropped one co

Today's challenge was: 'Recreate a well-known work of art.' I didn't want to do van Gogh's Starry Night - too overdone, nor one of Monet's Water Lilies series - too complicated (ain't nobody got time for that!) so instead I chose Mary Cassatt's Mrs. Duffee Seated on a Striped Sofa, Reading. As you can see above, my reproduction is on the left, Mary Cassatt's original on the right. Needless to say, I will not have a future career as an art forger. It's a lot harder than you

Since today's theme was 'splash of color' and because Easter is right around the corner I pulled out some plastic Easter eggs and nestled them in the lingering snow outside for today's challenge. They really popped against the white of the snow in the bright sunlight and despite the chill that was left in the air I really felt as though spring is coming. I actually spent a good bit of the morning decorating for Easter just to remind me that yes, in fact, it is spring. Isn't

So today's challenge was 'green'... obviously! What else would you do for St. Patrick's Day?! Anyway, I was kind of stuck for a while on what to draw or paint until I remembered seeing a lot of videos on YouTube about drip paintings. I'd never done one before and was going to hold off trying it until the last challenge, but then I figured, why not give it a shot now? After watching a couple of videos on different techniques one can try, I began to be a little apprehensive

Tonight, Stephanie Spangler presents... a celebrity who died before 1980 (and three objects that could be associated with him/her). Well, okay so I cheated a bit on this one since Alfred Hitchcock died in 1980, not before but I figured that was close enough to count. Alfred Hitchcock Presents always started off with the director's iconic silhouette so instead of doing a detailed portrait I chose his silhouette to represent him. The three additional objects are two images t

Today I went back to something I enjoy painting the most - stained glass. And because today's challenge was 'up close,' I chose to paint an closely cropped section of a Tiffany stained glass window. I did the painting in acrylic since I needed it to dry fairly quickly. However, if I was painting a larger piece that I could spend more time on I would probably have done it in oil. Oil paints work particularly well when trying to blend the many colors that are often used in