Rita Jan's Researched Art Blog

This painting is one of the most enjoyable paintings I made in my "Twilight Kiss" series. Notice her little smile of satisfaction and her jaunty little ponytail. This is in contrast to his quiet bulk and strength while he's holding her. I kept his face out of the painting to emphasize how warm and close they are together without making it a back-and-forth conversation.  I made their DEEP, quiet closeness even more apparent by painting deep shadows where their warm, loving bodies are touching. Her forehead is also wrinkled up a little in intensity of emotion. That makes her both contented and deeply happy with her man holding her in his reassuring strength and warmth. This painting shows so much intensity of emotion and contentment by the way her fingers are clutching at his shoulder. I really love how this painting in my "Twilight Kiss" series turned out. ~Rita Jan Gehman 

 My second Twilight Kiss painting was the first one I painted using a pure ultramarine blue background.  This made is much easier for the glowing, golden bodies of my "Physical Touch love language" intertwined couples to show up against that deep blue background.  This is also the first painting in my "Twilight Kiss" that has the words fitted around the bodies. "Support" and "Kindness" are in the background while "Passion" is on her left knee. I love how her smile has crinkling around the eyes. Additionally, I put a stylized tree around them. However, I felt this made the painting more busy than it should have been.  Therefore, I only added more background elements (besides the loving words) to the MUCH LARGER paintings in the series. Now, this painting also has a deeply contrasted couple which I think highlights their joyous emotions. This painting mostly turned out how I desired. However, I determined to clean up the background to mak...

 My "Twilight Kiss" series has really taken off. This blog post is about my very first painting in the series. At first, my goal was to create iridescent rainbow coloring throughout the series with golden bodies on top. However, as time went on, the idea of this kept appearing muddier and muddier in my mind. As time went on with #1, the first painting in the series, I saw how even using a purple background was going to make the foreground look more mottled, less clear. I also noticed that the words in the sky were stiffly drawn in a straight line, instead of flexibly shaped around the figures, as is done in all of my other paintings in my "Twilight Kiss" collection.  That was cute, but it made it appear more rigid, naive, and less professional.  It was the last time that was done in the "Twilight Kiss" series.  As I started painting the glowing bodies, I found that they weren't nearly as 3-dimensional as I'd wanted them to appear. But, at least I s...