"Psalm 23" (First Draft)

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"The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want." (Psalm 23: 1) Today's posting is the first draft of a new piece entitled "Psalm 23". It is a well known psalm and I suspect that most people easily recognize verse one.

This piece began with 140 lb. HP with one coat of white gesso. It was taped to the table with masking tape to keep it from buckling. The undetermined size at this point is at least 9" x 13". I am quite sure that by tomorrow, I will have made the final decision on size.

I am showing you two images today so that you can see that I decided to adhere text over the entire sheet of HP so that text would be peeking through the white areas of the rice paper. (You cannot see it as well today as you will be able to see it tomorrow since I have not yet sprayed the adhered pieces with spray acrylic which gives it translucency.) This is an excellent way to include text for those of you who are not lettering artists and want to integrate text into your work.

In case you haven't been out into any stores lately...chartreuse and gray are very hot colors right now so I simply had to do at least one piece with those colors. (The colors are Speedball Printing Inks. The chartreuse is yellow and a tiny bit of turquoise. The gray is pewter.) And that leads me to another point. If you have no idea what to do next in your art work, it is a good idea to go with one idea or color scheme that keeps haunting you. The same is true for a particular layout. I can make that part easy for you by saying that horizontal bands either horizontally or vertically work every time they're tried.

You might also want to notice that I chose to make all of the exposed edges erratic by tearing the mono printed rice papers. It seemed to look better to me, especially with hard lines in the mono prints created with cut up credit cards or shaper tools. Mono printing is an excellent way to practice your mark making skills.

The feedback on showing process has been extremely positive even though it is uncomfortable for me to do. I much prefer to show the finished piece, but alas, I simply cannot keep that pace up if I want to do larger works...and they will be getting much larger as I go along. Hope all of this helps you and prompts some of your own ideas. And there you have it...just a few more things to think about.