saying good bye to another canvas

I keep staring at the clock. I hate waiting. I'm super impatient and I realize this is a huge flaw but I'm really just not patient enough to fix it. I have class at 1:30 and 5:30 on Thursdays. So I have all this time to sit and look at the clock... counting down the minutes until I have to get ready and leave. I've already went running, watched last nights episode of America's Next Top Model (guilty pleasure!), made eggs and toast for breakfast, talked to my friend Jill, and unloaded then loaded the dishwasher. 21 minutes until I have to take a shower. ugh.
Anyway... on to the canvas. It's a 24" x 48" x 1.5" that I was asked to paint a few months ago. I took my time with it because I wanted to do something different and wanted it to be perfect. It's not only the first abstract I've done in a long time and one of the biggest, it's also my first experiment with modeling paste! Here's the pic... then I'll explain how I did it....

The inspiration for this painting was the song Take Me Home by After Midnight Project. When I opened the canvas (which is my favorite part!! I love the smell of the of new canvas)I first painted a few layers of dark grey to get the right background color. Then I started with the paint drips. Usually I'm an extreme control freak, which was ever so lovingly pointed out to me by an artist friend, and I like to put the paint in very clean defined lines wherever I see fit... so this was a huge step for me! My initial thought when I heard the song was heartbreak and the picture that formed in my head was driving home through tears, which mimicked rain. So the drips would represent the tears, but like how rain hits and flows on a windshield I didn't want just straight lines. So I used (don't laugh) an empty laughing cow cheese container to have the paint flow around. After it dried and I tried to remove them, they stuck and I kind of liked it.... so I painted them. But the just didn't look quite right so that's where the modeling paste comes in. I mixed it with a light grey to contrast and gooped it on. I love the effect! Then I cut out stars and placed them all over the canvas. Using a tooth brush, I got extremely speckled with paint and I ran my thumb over the bristles to speckle paint on the canvas. Pull off the cut out stars and viola! Then I added the music notes because i think that music is important when it comes to heartbreak. That's a whole other blog post in itself so I won't get started on that subject. But yeah... it's finished and going to it's new home on Friday.
Now I'm working on a 24" x 24" for a friend of a friend in Pennsylvania, which I started last weekend and should be finished with by Sunday. It's a really fun project that includes a quote, ocean sunset and two love birds. I'll post pictures when I'm finished.... now to get ready for business math.