Mondrain Windmill Acrylic Painting

 Mondrain Windmill

Acrylic painting

30x30cm on watercolour paper

This was a fun painting, painted in response to the acrylic forum challenge on Wetcanvas.com this month. The reference photo was a windmill and the challenge to paint in one of the many styles Mondrain used during his career. I chose to abstract the reference with coloured blocks of paint. I used photoshop as part of my process. After cropping the photo, I roughly traced the outline with lines and then blocks and coloured them using blue, red, yellow, green and black. After another look at Mondrain's work I realised he very rarely used green. I removed the layer containing the photo of the original and played around with the shapes and colours before printing out the reference. As I was drawing it up and painting the picture I refined the painting, removing shapes and changing the colours. It was a very interesting exercise and I could have simplified even further. It certainly made some of his work come to life for me.