more fiddleheads

I set up a painting area in my cellar last week. With the weather getting warmer this gives me a place to be working without worrying about getting charcoal and paint on the floor upstairs. The cellar is part dirt floor, part concrete. The insulation in the ceiling of the cellar is for the upstairs--it's covered with plastic sheets but hangs pretty low. Since I'm only 5' 4" tall, I can mostly walk around without having to duck too much--and I put the easel near the side of the cellar, near the small windows.


I've got a table, foam board to pin pictures and drawings on, rough shelves, plastic lawn chair to sit in. I've rigged up a place to hang canvases as I'm working on them. I use unstretched, gessoed canvas to paint on. I use charcoal, chalk, acrylic paint, graphite...applied with brushes, foam brushes, foam rollers, house painting brushes, sponges, sticks, my hands...in other words, anything I can make marks with and apply color and texture.



This was yesterday's start after my morning in the woods. It's hanging to let me look a it for a bit before switching it out to the drawing board to replace what I worked on late yesterday and continued on today.

These are working stages in planning tapestry designs and these images will go through many changes before I'm ready to commit to a line drawing on mylar that I'll use for weaving. I like to redraw and repaint many times over, hiding what went before. The gessoed canvas allows me to do that easily. I work on the composition for an hour or so, then I do something else while it dries.


This has been drawn and painted on three times now...began it yesterday afternoon, continued on it this morning, then changed it more...and more to come tomorrow.