My artwork tends to be heavily weighted towards abstract pieces, which i do love, however i wanted to play more with my style outside of my comfort zone. And what better way to do that than with the…
100 Pennies Challenge!
There has been a recent resurgence on the popularity of this challenge. Perhaps due to using the penny as a cheap “canvas”. I personally used it as a chance to play around more with landscapes, still life and portraiture. I highly recommend giving it a go, as it is fun and imaginative way to experiment with miniature styles and precision painting. The challenge is exactly what you’d expect it to be. painting 100 pennies. Also because of the small sizes it doesn’t take that long either, i spent 4 evenings leisurely making my way through the stacks of coins.
It was easy for me to start the challenge as i already had a large collection of pennies. I just had to clean them up. For that i used a vinegar and salt mix, the correct quantities to use i found online.
However If you do not have those ingredients there are quite a few alternatives you could use including; a pencil eraser, a lemon juice bath, soap, baking soda or covering the pennies in ketchup.
After cleaning the next step is to prime the surface of the pennies to paint on. For this you should realistically use Gesso as that is the purpose of that product and creates the perfect base.
However if like me you don’t have any to hand you can substitute it with white acrylic paint. You will have to use a minimum of 3 layers though so that the copper colour doesn’t bleed through.
As soon as the base is properly dried, you can get straight to painting. I used acrylic paint for my pennies as it is my paint of choice for most things. You can use oil paints if you want, but it will take a much longer time to dry.
I used a round headed paintbrush for lines and a flat headed for shading. The more delicate details where i wanted more control, and a stiffer brush i actually used my pencil dipped in paint so there would be no slight flexing. Reflecting back on that though, a better alternative to the pencil would have been a wooden skewer or toothpick.
I am extremely happy with my outcome. The first couple of iterations i felt were very standard hill/mountain/wave scenes with a standard use of the colour palette, but as i got more into it i started using abnormal and unrealistic colour schemes to create some surreal pieces. My final grouping of coins i also made some bolder subject choices challenging myself to capture waterfalls, a train in the countryside, lighthouses and a lamppost lit street.
When finished i played with the display, i felt putting the coins into the frames was the most effective and makes a very appealing option for a gift. I plan to carry on collecting pennies to create more paintings in the future.
