This will be my first process post - providing I can get the blog to cooperate when I post the images, and that's a big IF. Well, I'm sure it has more to do with my abilities than the workings of the blog template LOL.
I have been challenging myself in recent days to just start a piece and let it dictate where it goes until the voice inside finally says 'it's done'. The only idea I have in the beginning is usually the colour palette I start out with. Over the past couple of weeks that has been complimentary colours - predominantly red with accents of green/blue etc. The piece here was to use an analagous scheme of blues, greens and greys. (My apologies for the poor lighting and the neon green painter's tape - it was what I had on hand.)
So I began with some scribbling of several shades of blue and green watercolour crayons and then added a scribble of charcoal to connect these areas. It was at this point that potential names for the piece came to me - you can see it there in the upper right hand on the tape - threadbare I or tapestry I.
When I added water and pushed the colour around the page it faded much more than I expected it to. Up until now I had been using my Inktense blocks and this was my first run with watercolour crayons, so while it surprised me I was not unhappy with it and I learned something, always a bonus!
The next day, I decided to do something bold and declarative to see where my muse would take me. I drew in the bold black square with my extra wide Sharpie marker. Well, that was certainly an in your face bit of mark making LOL. I left a sliver of open space underneath which comes into play in the next stage. The square was coloured with cobalt green crayon and then wet and brushed into place. At this point some spattering of that same colour happened intentionally.
By this point, the green tape was a distraction and I was pretty sure I was done with my outside edges so I removed it. The piece needed something else to give it life so in comes pyrrole red to play with the teal. It joined the spattering crowd as well as the blob and the sliver under the square. My brain just laughs at all the technical jargon here.
I was done for the day, but not sure the piece was done so I did what has always worked well for me and walked away. I just love how refreshing and helpful that approach is to really clarify what is missing. When I looked at it first thing the next morning I knew the weight of the black marker lines was waaaaay too heavy, so that needed to be fixed. I painted over most of the square with gesso, thinning the border lines to about half their previous width, then added the cobalt green back in. Much happier!
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Threadbare (C) Susan Langdon aka Nukiart
Mixed media on 12 x 16 watercolour paper |
By this point I'd decided to name it Threadbare and that led me to the final decision to paint a line of stitching down the right hand edge of the big square. Seeing it here, it really needs the white border around it but my scanner isn't big enough to capture that
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If this post were a dvd it would have a blooper reel LOL. Because I had used charcoal to draw the initial, thread like lines, I needed to 'fix' it in place so I decided to cover the entire piece with matte medium. I knew it would give a bit of fuzziness to the charcoal itself and I liked that idea. What I hadn't counted on was it smearing the ink of my signature really badly, so bad. I didn't want to abandon the piece so after letting it dry thoroughly I brought out the gesso again, covered the old signature up and redid that section again with much better results this time around. Another lesson learned on my journey as an artist LOL.
