I’ve had this shallow wooden bowl for quite some time and I’ve always been terrified of it. Seems whenever I see this bowl painted by others, it’s covered with stroke work. I can’t do stroke work. I don’t want to do stroke work. So I decided to try a different approach.

I went textured and contemporary. First I painted the entire bowl with a yellow oxide/raw sienna combination. Then I added vertical strips of white tissue paper, glueing the paper to the surface using gloss polymer medium. When dry, I covered the entire bowl with Nickel Azo Yellow fluid acrylic. That gave me the vertical dark and light pattern you see on the bowl. I painted the floor of the bowl with a couple of coats of Titanium White plus Nickel Azo Yellow then topped those layers with a coat of Jo Sonja’s Crackle Medium. I love that crackle medium – it works for me every time. When the crackle dried, I washed a red/violet into the cracks then I dry brushed everything with a white/phthalo turquoise mix to tone down the colors.

Now here’s the reason for painting this bowl. See the arched lines on the bottom edge? This type of pattern was something I worked on in my fine art classes at university in the mid-1970s. I found my pattern textbook from those classes recently and decided to give pattern lines another try. And once again I’m hooked. I bought an inexpensive nib and holder, filled the nib with a red violet fluid acrylic then created the pattern. Now, almost everthing I create contains fluid acrylic line work in a repeat pattern based on work I did back at university. Who says you can’t go home again?