Monday, May 30, 2016

Time for a Change of Pallette


I've been using a lot of blues and greens lately and felt that it was time to explore the warm side of the color wheel.  I've been watching a TV show called "The Story of God" narrated by Morgan Freeman.  Sometime during nearly every episode he visited India and I was struck with the gorgeous brilliant colors there.  And that inspired me to not only use those colors, but to choose an Indian subject - a tiger with a crown of lotus blossoms.

I cut a board with an arched top, primed it, then began with a black and white collage.  Many of the collage elements are "found" - book pages, napkins, tissue paper, etc. - but many are also elements that I created myself by painting with black fluid acrylic on deli paper.  When I apply the deli paper elements with mat medium, the deli paper itself virtually disappears, leaving only the black brush strokes showing.  By the way, I always tear the edges of my collage elements rather than cut them.

I had drawn both the lotus blossoms and the tiger.  I tore the blossoms from the sheet of drawing paper and used them as elements in the collage. The last step of the collage phase was adding some opaque coarse molding paste here and there.

To begin the painting,I then applied all the background color using transparent fluid acrylics.  There are probably as many as eight layers of paint in parts of the background.  I then ripped out the drawing of the tiger, tearing as close as possible to the edges of the figure, and "glued" it in place with mat medium.  My other choice would have been to cut the tiger out exactly, position it in place, draw around it, fill the area with gesso, trace the details of the tiger, then transfer them to the gessoed patch.  But I decided the take the shorter route.

I then began painting the tiger, once again using fluid acrylics - some transparent and some opaque.

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