"Blessed" (draft 2)

(draft 2....8" x 10")

This piece is all about Psalm 1. The complete text will appear in the final. There is, however, a great deal of text in this second draft which is setting the stage for the final lettering. Tomorrow you will see the power of very straight script written in black and how it calms everything in this piece down without jeopardizing the energy you see now.  I also cropped it to an 8" x 10" size.

There are several reasons why this piece is coming together in a beautiful way. And most of those reasons have to do with contrasts. The first and most obvious contrast is between the textured areas and the non textured areas. When delivering thin paint like this to a surface and with a brayer, there is transparency and hard edges, but very little detail.  When the mono printed black papers were added, complex and compelling texture entered the scene. And remember that black and white plus one or two other colors works every time it's tried.

The next contrast is the color. Not only the colors plus black and white, but the fact that the blue and orange are direct complements on the color wheel. There is also a contrast of saturation of color. By mixing the two complementary colors, some interesting "grayed" down colors (or less intense) appeared. That automatically decreased their saturation and also the addition of white and a lot of water diluted them further. This is a stark contrast to the black color....even though some of those pieces are less saturated as well with a mix of some very dark blacks.

Another strong contrast appears in the static vs. dynamic lines in the piece. Static is either totally horizontal or vertical and dynamic is curved or diagonal. This is easy to achieve with a brayer and it is also easy to achieve in the mono printed papers. There are diagonal and circular lines in several of those pieces. And this is why I suggested you have a combination of both types of printed papers on hand. That circular pattern in the bottom center is crucial to the success of this piece.

Today, I dealt with values and having subtle shifts in the values of my lettering. This layering of letters also adds some subtle detail and marries the colors and shapes together by crossing over them in the same way you might stitch two pieces of fabric together. The choice of color for the brush lettering also breaks up the strong diagonal and softens the blow of such a strong line. (Tomorrow's posting with straight black lines of script will further soften that diagonal.) But that diagonal provides the underlying energy of the piece so I am glad I put it there in the first place.

The other contrasts have to do with the different sizes of lettering and the tools used. There is pencil, brush, and a Mitchell #6 nib. All of that creates a nicely textured and subtle background for my last bit of lettering. If you don't do lettering, consider line work and doodling (much like a zentangle to create some interesting value shifts and detail. (If you don't know what a zentangle is....just google it. Quite fascinating.)   And there you have it...just a few more things to think about.