"Psalm 103" (draft 3)

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On this occasion of Mother's Day, you will be blessed by Psalm 103:1. This is the last draft and so I will be posting the final with lettering tomorrow. Enjoy your day!

Since yesterday, I have added more plain rice papers to create some more translucency and transparency. I then sprayed it with spray acrylic coating and decided it needed a touch of color. I chose not to use mono printed rice papers since that would create too much texture and compete with the texture in the glass.

Soft pastels came to my rescue...again. And they really must be soft pastels which contain enough pigment to do something for you. Chalk pastels are cheap and should be thrown in the trash. They are useless. After choosing my color to go with the blue/green in the glass, I used a break off knife to shave some onto a foam disposable plate. Using a hake brush or something akin to a blush brush, I placed the brush in the pastel powder and brushed it onto the rice papers. It was stronger than I wanted so I took a kneaded eraser and removed a lot of it until I had a light tint.

Soft pastels are useful for delivering color to a piece without creating hard lines when you need some color in a particular area. It works with any medium. If your surface is too slick to receive it...sponge on a coat of Liquitex Clear Gesso which creates a textured surface for this very purpose. The last thing I did today was to use a regular .05 mechanical pencil as well as a charcoal pencil to create some erratic line work and a few words. I then smudged the lines with my finger and also used the kneaded eraser to make it a lot more subtle.

And lest you think that you might be copying someone else's style by including these erratic and gestural lines in your work...not to worry. Every mixed media artist on the planet knows how to do this and many make it the hallmark of their work. Katherine Chang Liu....Fred Otnes...Peggy Brown...just to name a few. These lines add energy to the piece and also make connections between the shapes. It's like advanced "scribbling". If you know how to scribble, you can do this. And there you have it...just a few more things to think about.