Mixed Media Demonstration -cont.

Ok, so after I had gotten to the last step of the mixed media demo from Jan 27th, I spent several hours playing with it, trying to make it work, but it was going from bad to worse! I got frustrated with it and decided to gesso it over and give it another try -kind of a catharsis. I put 2 layers of gesso on it and then a layer of gloss medium to seal the surface. Then I thought I would stamp into the gesso with my large, dry stamp, and behold the gesso was not quite dry so it left a cool imprint in it. You can see above where the stamp actually grazed into the underlying color a bit (the shine is the gloss medium, so you can see where it got removed with my stamp)

So I was re-energized to begin again and see how the new imprints would take the paint. I used the same colours as before (Quin gold, Quin crimson and Ultramarine blue) and popped them in and mixed them around. You can see how the gesso takes the paint differently(it is semi-absorbant) than the gloss medium (non-absorbant); as well, the paint kind of settled into the indentations. I did a little more stamping as well at this stage, mostly with the small spiral stamp.

Next I took a viewfinder design and began to block out some of the shapes with darker paint. At this point I could see the suggestion of where a figure could be (the breast shape on center right side and a butt-cheek and legs in the lower part of the painting. I had no idea where the head would be or what her upper torso was doing. I spent another several hours trying to get her to work -but alas, that wasn't working out either. So desperation hit yet again (heavy sigh) and I took my rubbing alcohol and poured it all over the painting and took my wet sandpaper and scrubbed at the mess until all I had was a ghost of the former paint. This left a very cool texture again, because I had applied the gesso layers with a foam roller, which left a bumpy texture, so the paint lifted off the high bits and remained in the valleys. If you zoom into the painting below, you can see some of that texture.

This time I took and put in some more dark passages, and decided to keep it abstract-no more figure finding for me right now! I painted through a stencil in varying ways to keep the texture moving from the lower right to the upper left -light against dark and then dark against light. Repetition with variation, remember? Then I began to add different colour opaques to it, breaking up shapes and joining others. I was once again having fun!

More dark pattern to link the the elements of the painting together. I think this is the final painting -at least for now!

Moral of this lesson: It's never over 'til it's over -gotta love acrylics...

Enjoy!

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