The Olive Green Challenge, part 2

I've added the corrugated cardboard frame.  To do it, I cut four corner pieces and glued them down with Liquitex Matt Gel Medium.  I weighted it with books for good contact and let it set overnight.

The next morning, I peeled away the top layer of cardboard, revealing the corrugation underneath.  I waited until the glue dried so that the back wouldn't lift as I pulled the top layer away.  It seemed that there was a bit of dampness in the cardboard (from the medium, I presume) that made the peeling easier.

After that, I applied a layer of gesso, then painted it green - Chrome Oxide green, to be precise - and added a few darker splotches with washes of Phtalo Blue Red Shade.

I am bothered that the lightest spot of the circle will be covered with the frog, but I went into that last time - a shameful lack of planning!

The Olive Green Challenge

Somerset Studio Magazine is having a challenge - see what you can do with Olive Green.  Well, green is my favorite color in all its glorious variety.  Olive Green is not my favorite green, but I like it well enough.  Somerset Studio is all about mixed media, so of course this will be a mixed media piece.  I hope my piece is good enough to make an appearance in the magazine!

I have decided to portray Olivia the frog.  I'm going to use a square format with a circle in the middle, so I begin with collage and painting in the center of the square.  The dragonflies and the squiggle at 7 o'clock are elements that I painted on deli paper and then used in the collage. 

I love the pale phthalo green in the lower part but, unfortunately, I think it's going to be covered by the frog;  I should have outlined it in place before I began painting.  That way I could have planned my color placement better.

Nile Diety

A few posts ago I showed a few small stoneware sculpture pieces drying and awaiting their first firing.

Here's the crocodile, glazed and finished.  After brushing the glaze on, I set the crocodile on top of the plinth in the kiln and when it fired the two pieces fused from the glaze melting.  The two pieces of the headdress I fired separately.  The turquoise bead had a whole all the way through while the blue piece had a hole in the bottom and the crocodile had a hole in the top of his head.  After the pieces were fired, I put a short piece of toothpick into the hole on his head then threaded the turquoise and blue pieces onto the toothpick with glue to keep everything in place.  E6000 does a great job gluing glass which is essentially what the glazed surface of these pieces are.

A Hare in Progress

Next, I'm working on a hare.  To begin her, I started with a lump of clay that I shaped to be her head (not including the ears) and body (not including the tail.  After I was generally satisfied with that shape, I added ears and eyes and modeled her muzzle in more detail.

At that point, she was a solid lump of clay.  To hollow her out, I used a piece of thin fishing line to cut her body in half crosswise.  I hollowed out each half, then scored and slipped the cut edges and stuck her back together.  I pierced a hole in her chest so that the air inside to could escape when it expands in the heat of the kiln.  I let it sit for a while at this stage to let that seam rest.  The slip in the seam is more moist than the surrounding clay so that it tends to move.  As it sits, the moisture evens out and the cut is sealed more firmly.

Then I added the legs, then began adding the legs, one at a time.  As you can see, at the point I took this photo, I wasn't quite finished.  But I proceeded to add the back legs, then I textured her and pressed a spiral design into her left hip. 

Crocodile Diety and Regular Cat

It's time for more sculpting - for more reasons than one.  The main one is that a show entry deadline is coming up soon and I decided I wanted to enter both a 2D and a 3D piece.  The tiger painting will be my 2D piece and I wanted a crocodile as my 3D piece.

I was recently watching an episode of "River Monsters" with Jeremy Wade and Jeremy was in Africa - don't remember exactly where but it seemed like the upper Nile region - searching for tiger fish.  A by-product was encounters with several Nile crocodiles, including one that was languidly swimming away from him.  I was so struck by the beauty of the animal's movements that I determined to learn more and to sculpt him even though I don't usually portray animals that aren't north American or European (it's not a prejudice - just that I feel that they are someone else's special animals rather than part of my cultural heritage).

During my research I found several beautiful ancient Egyptian depictions of these impressive creatures.  I have always been awed by the elegance of the way those people sculpted and painted animals and crocodiles were just one more example of that fine talent of that culture.

My challenge became how to "jump off" from that start - suggesting the originals, but still making them my own.  I don't know whether or not I lived up to that challenge.

The crocodile is definitely "my own" with its smile that just won't be wiped away from my animals mouths. But I'm not sure that I really added enough of my own vision.  Perhaps it will be clearer when the piece is fired and glazed.  By the way, the two small pieces in the lower center of the photo will be the crocodile's headdress.

The other piece is a little cat.  Although I am very familiar with cats since I live with several, I find them the hardest animals to draw, paint, or - especially - sculpt.  So I thought I'd just set myself that problem - could I finally sculpt a good cat?  Once again, the just is still out, but I suspect that the answer will be "not quite!"

Both these pieces are speckled brown stoneware from Clay-King.com.

The Finished Tiger

The tiger painting is now finished.  The final step was making the frame.  To do it, I cut a piece of 1/4" hardboard that was one inch all around larger than the tiger's board.

I used the metal embossing technique I learned in Michael DeMeng's class in April in Santa Rosa.  The border is piece from five separate pieces of metal since I didn't have a metal sheet large enough for the entire frame.  It was a tedious process.  I began on the curve and cut as large a piece as I could from my 9" x 12" metal sheets.  The pieces needed to cover the one inch border plus enough to wrap around the edge and secure on the back plus about 1/2" to sit under the tiger panel.

One I cut the first piece, I decided on my border design and embossed the metal.  I then glued the metal in place and cut the next piece.  Working in that sequence, I continued until the entire edge was covered.

I then needed to do the patina.  When I embossed, I worked so that the painted side of the metal would be the finished side, but some of the paint rubbed off as I worked.  So I sprayed the painted metal with workable fixatif so that the metallic paint would stick.  I painted the Six Seconds bronze metal paint over the embossing and let it dry.  I then applied the second coat and sprayed the patine on while the paint was still wet.

I let the frame piece dry over night then glued the tiger panel in place to finish the piece.

Actually, there is one step left which is to cut a piece of something (not such what - maybe mat board - to cover the back and the raw edges of the metal.

My embossing could have been better - I had some problems following the curve with the rolling texture tool - but overall I'm very happy with this piece!

Re-Painted the Lotus

I concluded that the problem with the lotus was that they looked transparent, and that was because of the way I painted them.  So I painted over them with white gesso and began again.

This time, my plan was to use a peachy pink on the petals that we see the outside of, and a cooler pink on the petals we see the inside of.  Furthermore, I wanted the flowers lit from below as though they are being lit from the yellow-orange glow behind the tiger.  The painting was pretty straight-forward - I used opaque colors and worked wet-in-wet.  I finished the bluish pink petals first and then worked on the peachy pink petals, which are the petals in front.

In the end, I painted turquoise accents around the tips of the petals and added small touches of yellow green at the base of the stems.

Another problem I had with the painting was the edge of the paper that I drew the tiger on.  When I originally tore-cut it from the sheet of drawing paper, I cut a straight edge along the bottom expecting that it would alight with the bottom edge of the board.  But it turned out that I placed it about 3/8" above the bottom edge of the board, and the edge of the paper was too obvious.  So, I painted a decorative strip across the bottom to obscure the edge.  I based the design of the strip on the dark brush strokes in the collage background at the lower right edge of the tiger.

Finally, I molded some paper clay pieces for around the edge.  I painted them with Six Seconds bronze and then applied their patina.  My intention was to suggest fragments of a long-since damaged bronze frame.