Experimenting with mixed media.

I should be in my element here as I’ve never been afraid to mix anything with anything else – gouache and pencil and ink and acrylic and bits of collage and sometimes a drag or two of oil pastel. I’m guessing some sort of discipline about choice might be more important in this task though. I’ve begun by applying a coarse layer of acrylic gesso on a sheet of A2 cartridge because I like the texture it provides and the way it holds all sorts of media, although I haven’t tried with inks or pencil yet. I have new inks on order and arriving soon so it might be hard to resist giving them an outing. I also have a bottle of white ink that I haven’t tried yet and I can see how that might come into its own as lines on layered colour backgrounds. While it’s drying (the literature says 24 hours), I have a piece of mauve sugar paper taped to a smaller board ready for something I haven’t decided on yet; and there are those coloured sheets I glued into my sketchbook to fiddle around with.

This is Flora, qualifying as still life by simultaneously being both for a substantial period of time. This was a quick sketch using mixed media which reminded me how quickly ink dries on sugar paper. I used white pencil to sketch out her outline, then went for fine lines in white ink with no success at all due to the absorption. Dabbing – almost as small footprints – worked better and I liked the irregularity that introduced even though the simple line drawing also seemed rather nice. Following that change to the way the image was emerging, I used white, then blue, then black pastel to slide some texture into the ‘wire frame’ drawing and make a kind of map of her body on the paper. Not so sure about that round area where her hip lies. Might tackle that tomorrow.

As a note to myself, I did this without my close vision glasses because I found that allowed for a better appreciation of the whole as opposed to detail. It’s probably my equivalent of squinting.

10th Jan.

Different light as it’s morning and natural whereas yesterday’s photo was taken in the evening using a daylight lamp. I think that rump looks a little less like a target now with the additional blue/white pencil lines.