Painting Rocks

This is a painted rock.

Two friends have milestone birthdays this weekend: Liz is turning forty, and Anne is eighty! Seemed a good time to resurrect my long-lost art of stone-painting. When I first moved to North Van (almost 15 years ago!), I spent a bohemian winter (read: semi-starvation) painting and wandering the riverside trails of Lynn Valley. Among other survival tactics, I painted river-rocks and sold them at the Vancouver Art Gallery gift shop.

Here's the 30-foot pool (below):

Ooo. Pretty rocks. So here's the process:

Go for hike in valley. Wear good boots for skidding down the short-cut bank instead of following touristy trails. Wear a backpack. Scramble along shoreline for 300m or so, scouring shallows for pretty rocks.

Pick rocks with interesting bumps and colours, relatively smooth, of reasonable size. Avoid granite, which is too pixel-y. Set them on high boulders to pick up on your way back. Make sure the rocks will stand firmly on a flat surface, with the most interesting face exposed. You'll need more than you think you need.

Hike out with your backpack full of small boulders. Consider the merits of painting something lighter, like bark.

At home, scrub rocks to remove any sliminess. Let dry, then paint with Polymer Medium (Gloss), a glaze you can find in art supply stores. This will bring up the mineral colours, though not as bright as fresh-from-the-river colours.

Then, as time permits, stare at rocks every which way (possibly for hours--this is a non-lucrative art form). Wait for rocks to "speak to you." Maintain total faith that you will see something. When it happens, it's uncanny how the existing shapes and crevices "fall into place." That's the thrilling part. Don't give up.

Sketch in forms with chalk. Paint them. Ideally, I try to let the natural colours/shapes of the stone define the form as much as possible, and bring it together with as little paint as possible. Pretty zen.

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Before:

After (again):

Sometimes I glaze over the whole stone again, after painting, but this time I just glazed certain elements, like the moon/leaves/waterfall for special effect. I also glued pieces of flattened recycled bicycle tubes to the bottoms so the rocks can sit on surfaces without scratching/sliding.