Magdalena Nitla

Check out the video of me painting “Zig-Zags” in fast forward here:

This painting started with a vision I had one day… nothing supernatural, just an image when I closed my eyes of zig zags in a certain kind of pattern that I found appealing and easy enough to put down on paper.

I had fun working on this painting, playing around with the colors, covering them and re-covering them with what I liked at any given moment.

I also had fun removing colors and simplifying the pattern by adding white… defining the colored lines by the negative space around them. I wanted the right set of lines to be thinner than the left set, and I used the white paint to delineate them.

Glitter was added in carefully at the end. When working in layers of acrylic paint, covered glitter can end up losing iridescence and the previously glittery pieces end up just taking on the texture of sand (not necessarily a bad thing). One of the middle stripes in the painting had two layers of glitter, however… a chunky silver below a fine blue. Layering and mixing glitters is something I might explore in the future.