Mermaid Piece part 15
Still suffering the effects of a long cold that has been hanging around for weeks, but Tuesdays are often Studio days for me anyway, so I took a moment to go in and advance my mermaid project by a little bit. Actually I had stopped by yesterday to check the progress of ink drying on my proofs, and found some sections fairly dry, others still thick with wet ink.
That thick ink could take a long time to dry, and not wanting to wait forever to finish this thing, I gave some thought to how I could work around the problem. As a professor one of my main jobs is helping students to figure out how to solve art related problems, and having taught 2D, 3D, drawing, printmaking, and some general classes, there are few art related problems I haven't dealt with. When I checked out the proofs yesterday, I found the green ink on the tail was still wet, so I put that off for another day. The dark mass of her hair was fairly dry, but not the starfish or the sand dollar on the side of her head. So that was the place to work on today. I figured out something.
My plan for the hair was always to go over the dark part with light highlights, a common approach artists use to show depth in hair, leaves of a tree, etc. Rolling my brayer over the sand dollar and star fish would have probably spread those inks into her hair, not a desirable thing. So I took some scrap drawing paper, took an offset print off those parts, cut out that dual shape, and placed it on top of the print, exactly over the place it came from. Using the cut piece as a masking stencil, I could safely roll a hard brayer over all the hair, applying a textured layer of a medium value orange over the dark mass without contaminating anything else. It all took less than an hour, including clean up, to do both proofs. Results can be seen above. Not quite done with the hair yet, but this is an improvement, and eventually a layer of blonde hair will go over what's here, adding further depth. I'll deal with the tail another time.
That thick ink could take a long time to dry, and not wanting to wait forever to finish this thing, I gave some thought to how I could work around the problem. As a professor one of my main jobs is helping students to figure out how to solve art related problems, and having taught 2D, 3D, drawing, printmaking, and some general classes, there are few art related problems I haven't dealt with. When I checked out the proofs yesterday, I found the green ink on the tail was still wet, so I put that off for another day. The dark mass of her hair was fairly dry, but not the starfish or the sand dollar on the side of her head. So that was the place to work on today. I figured out something.
My plan for the hair was always to go over the dark part with light highlights, a common approach artists use to show depth in hair, leaves of a tree, etc. Rolling my brayer over the sand dollar and star fish would have probably spread those inks into her hair, not a desirable thing. So I took some scrap drawing paper, took an offset print off those parts, cut out that dual shape, and placed it on top of the print, exactly over the place it came from. Using the cut piece as a masking stencil, I could safely roll a hard brayer over all the hair, applying a textured layer of a medium value orange over the dark mass without contaminating anything else. It all took less than an hour, including clean up, to do both proofs. Results can be seen above. Not quite done with the hair yet, but this is an improvement, and eventually a layer of blonde hair will go over what's here, adding further depth. I'll deal with the tail another time.
posted by arrabbiata at 8:00 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home