After getting grades posted and other loose ends tied up at school this morning I was able to get outside at the studio. I painted on both of these for a couple of hours, mixing a plate full of color and going back and forth between the two to use it up.
My painting set-up is very low-tech...a Corelle plate for a palette, a few plastic paint mixing spatulas, brushes of several sizes--none very expensive. Water container (recycled yogurt tub), a few paper towels...all sitting on an empty plastic bucket. Since the purpose of my painting is to develop design for tapestry I don't use better tools and materials for this step. Once I've completed the composition and it's traced onto mylar, the canvas is rolled up and put on the shelf.
The first composition that I began last week has now developed to this point. Needs more work tomorrow on the background...still too different in color from the fiddlehead. I wanted a bit of complementary color contrast but this is too much and the greens I washed over some areas are too clear...need to tone it down.
More work on the creek view...still have several days to go on this. Since it's part of the fern study one of the things that needs to happen is to make the ferns in the lower right foreground more specific and more dominant, I think.
Tomorrow I might think about starting a fourth composition to see if I can find a mid-point of design--somewhere between the extreme close views of the fiddleheads and the broader view in which the ferns are only a small part of the emphasis.
This is almost like a "zoom" approach but I'm not yet getting it to work in that way. It's just now occurring to me that I'm headed that way. My friend Diane has done fabric collage with zooms and they're wonderful.
But--one more diversion today--taking details of the two closeups of fiddleheads and cutting and rearranging combined, using filters in Photoshop...
Maybe I need to explore this direction more...pretty interesting shapes happening.
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