"Psalm 100" (draft 2)

(draft 2)

Today's second draft of Psalm 100 reveals the addition of mono printed rice papers. There are more papers to come, but I hope you can see how dramatically it altered the piece from yesterday.

There has been a flurry of activity at Buck Hill Studio today...four hours to be exact. I began by mono printed a few papers in all of the colors represented in the piece. Sounds like that could be knocked out in about 30 min., but "oh contrare"! With a lot of humidity in the air and needing to dry, spray, and dry again took about (2) hours.

The next step was to cut segments of the papers to go in areas that will line up with the brayered lines of color.  This was accomplished by cutting the rice papers right on the support and using a grid ruler when necessary to make sure the pieces lined up.  I am still not satisfied, but ran out of time so I will be looking at this piece either in the studio or on my iphone during the day so I can see where I might want some more texture. In fact, looking at a photo of your piece in progress is always a good idea. It removes you from the studio and the chaos of creating to give you a whole new perspective.

If I realize I need to tone down an area, all I need to do is adhere some plain rice paper over the aggressive area to create a very translucent effect. Today, what you see is a very stark contrast between transparency and texture with saturated color. This is an extreme contrast and my preference is to have a full range of values and different degrees of transparency and translucency represented which is not present yet.

If you try this yourself, you might have some difficulty accepting the look of the mono printed papers being adhered to those light bands of color. It's almost like cold water in your face, but it is very important to keep moving along with the knowledge that gesso or plain rice papers, or soft pastels can mute any area quite nicely. It's just not good to do that until you have all of your mono printed papers adhered.

This is the one obstacle that many artists have with mixed media. The desire is to see the finished outcome before the piece is finished. That's why I am happy to show you the step-by-step process so you can see how it all develops. Today things are a bit "jarring", but they will get much better in the next two postings. 

This piece will probably take until Sunday or Monday to be completely finished. One of the reasons being that I also plan to have one or three glass inclusions. It's all quite fascinating. And there you have it...just a few more things to think about.