Hope's Art Journey

Blog on “Spring Palms”

As I continue my art journey, I do get frustrated by technical issues.  For one thing, as easy as the website was to develop on FASO, the blog has boggled my mind.  I hate to tell you how many times I have typed away and somehow erased the whole story.  Anyway, this time I will be doing it in Word and pasting it in the blog.  Pardon the spacing issues.

I have been reading and studying about artists who work on paper in drawing or pastel media and present their work without framing it.  That opens up a whole new area for me.  I want to develop some mixed media works from photographs I have that lend themselves to more drawing than painting.  So, I have collected my pictures, cropped and composed them with my trusty proportion wheel and ordered the supplies to continue.  This particular small work 7” x 5” is the first of the series.

Part of my inventory includes some very nice printmaking paper which will not be used for that purpose.  And, it does take washes but sometimes not in large areas.  It is hard to control the flow and sometimes it creates hard edges not desired.  The first step was to coat the paper with buff watercolor ground.  It created a nice texture.  I drew in my image, starting with the horizon line.  I only draw the horizon line in my paintings but I felt I needed the trees drawn in since washes of acrylic and pencil drawing are not easily corrected.  I washed in the blues of the sky and water and painted touches of purple/sienna in the darkest areas of the trees and mud.  I used colored pencil for the finer areas such as the trunks of the palms and carried through with water soluble crayons.  They are so much fun.  You can create fuzzy pastel type lines or more solid areas.  If you get too much, you can touch them with a wet brush or blend edges.  It was a back and forth process with pencil and crayons until I got the effect desired. 

It will be sprayed with a UV protective varnish and mounted on claybord.  I will describe this after I do it.  I felt I would work small at first until I master the transfer and varnish process.