TNT's First Commission Piece

Hello Folks,

Terry & I were asked to do a unique commission piece this new year. Our client owns a hair salon called "Shear Perfection". She wanted a painting with her company colours to brighten up her space, but she also wanted a place for her clients to hang their coats. Jade McCarthy has some mad hair styling skills and lots of other creative talents, but she needed some help with this one. We put our heads together and came up with this. She loved it.

Jade is an artsy, free-spirited glitter girl. We wanted this piece to really sing for her, as well as to represent her business. She gave us lots of valuable input into what she liked, and into what she didn't like, which is just as important. We drew up a design and brought it in for her approval. After some minor tweaking, we got to work. Terry did all the woodworking, customizing the sturdy coat-rack decor piece to frame around an 18"x24" canvas.

We all agreed that a butterfly would represent the way Jade transforms her clients with her talents as a hair stylist. But the wings had to be flowing and organic in design. I knew an acrylic pour for the wings was the way to go, but there are many techniques from which to choose. There are a lot of other variables besides, so I set to doing a few practice paintings to help me decide. For the first one I used a hair dryer to blow the paint out. I liked the results and plan to do something with this painting soon, but the colours were not exactly right. I also used too much paint and didn't have the control I wanted to have.

For my 2nd practice piece, I tried doing a "swipe" technique. I absolutely hated the result. I plan to sand this one down and reuse the canvas. The colours were all off too. The magenta completely overpowered the painting. Yuck!

My 3rd practice was too dark, but I liked the results. With a few tweaks, I felt confident I could go on to do the real painting. For this one, I used a motorized tube blow that Terry used for blowing out computer electronics in the past. I loved the feathery textures it created in the paint. I'll probably paint over this one too because I don't like the upper wings, but it helped me to find my groove.

Here is Jade's painting, still wet, with the final wings painted on. I'm very pleased with how it turned out.

I had to let this dry for a few days before I could go to the next part of the painting. First I took the better part of a day to draw a pair of hair cutting shears. I measured it out on graph paper and then transferred the drawing to the canvas right where the body of the butterfly would be. I only wish I'd spent additional time in the first days of the project, practicing how to paint metal with acrylic paint. It's quite tricky and I wasn't able to achieve the results I'd hoped for. Still, I'm satisfied and, more importantly, Jade was happy with it.

We collected a number of hair styling tools, such as Jade would use in her salon (she actually supplied a few), took out the guts and spray painted them with Krylon glitter paint in purple. Then Terry securely affixed them with screws and nails to the boards around the painting. He added a small shelf (to protect the painting) above the nickel-plated coat hooks. The wood was painted in a lovely slate grey called, "Thunder". The photo shown does not yet have the painted wooden plugs that went over the screw holes to finish everything off nicely. We are very proud of our joint venture with our first commission. Our client and new friend, Jade, was thrilled to pieces, which makes it all worth the weeks of labour.