"Psalm 100" (draft 1)

(draft 1)

Today's posting is the beginning of Psalm 100. That will remain the title for now, but as in Psalm 103:1, the title changed in the final. The first draft is always exciting because it is a new beginning and even I do not know what the final will look like. I have no preconceived idea so that I can remain open to what I see happening on the paper.

Even though I do not have a preconceived idea, I am thinking about design. Staying true to my artistic voice which is to contrast opacity, translucency, and transparency in my mixed media works, I have begun with transparency. The colors I chose were based on a mexican pot painted with these same colors. And I chose Speedball Printing Ink as my paint and brayers as the way to deliver the paint to the paper which is a full sheet of 300 lb. HP.  (The final will be 18" x 24")

The dark blue was blue mixed with a bit of black. The turquoise was right out of the jar. The yellow green was green plus yellow. The orange was orange plus a bit of the dark blue. I mixed all of these colors on a glass surface with a palette knife and added a lot of water to each pile. To make sure it was well mixed, I sloshed the paint around with my hand (wearing thin latex gloves.)

By diluting the color a great deal, I am insuring the transparency. Using 1.50", 2", and 4" brayers, I began to apply the paint to dry paper. Because of the size of the paper, I did need to make at least 2 applications of color in each stripe. It is easy to do with brayers since you can see exactly how to line it up with the previous application. My desire was to include static and dynamic lines while preserving some white areas. Those white areas will add a lot of sparkle to the piece.

My next step today will be to create some mono printed papers using the same colors you see today. I will also be adding some black mono printed papers. Using black plus white and color and in different saturations will cover almost if not all of the values on the gray scale.

Color may be the most emotional of the design elements, but contrast is the most critical design principal. So today I have introduced a contrast of line (static and dynamic), a contrast of hue (or color), and a small contrast of saturation. Tomorrow, there will be even more contrasts in these same areas with an additional contrast of texture.

Also notice that all of the bands of color go edge to edge which grounds them to the design space and creates many great divisions of space. And there you have it...just a few more things to think about.