99 Bottles part 7.1

Over the weekend I worked out my color choices for this piece, using the practice copy to test them out. On Sunday evening I taped the good copy of the print down onto my drawing board, but chose not to color it at that time.

Monday morning I was ready to go.  The biggest area was the negative space- all the sand.  Hadn't tested that, but I knew from extensive experience with beaches that the color I would want was Buff Titanium (seems to be a darker version of Titanium White), and put a wash of that down in a lot of broad areas.  Put a thicker version down in some areas to represent texture and shadows. For the paper with the words, I had experimented with New Gamboge, but as with the Vesuvio print, I found the full strength color to be too intense, and went with a mix of white and Naples yellow, and the same for the bottle label.  Normally glass would be clear, but I wanted it to separate a little from the warm tone of the sand, so added a hint of blue.  For the shells- black and white with a little brown for the clam shell, black and white with a little indigo for the mussel shell. And it was done.

Still taped to my drawing board, I brought it to the Studio to photograph.  Took a nice 1MB image to submit for the video, and the smaller format version seen above.  Molly was in working on some big production run, but I got out of there.  Very steamy in the basement, and in that kind of weather, paper sticks to skin, kind of hard to get anything done.

In the evening I submitted my large photo to the website for that purpose (a google drive thing- I've worked with it before for class, where my students had to submit everything online this semester), and sent a short note to Amy, along with the small photo as a preview, just to let her know it was in.  In my brief time on the drive I saw thumbnails of some of the other work.  In mail she had mentioned that she was expecting a lot of gel pen and refrigerator magnet art, but what I saw was bit more sophisticated than that.  Before the night was over, I got a response- thanking me for my piece and praising it, and answering some questions and comments I had regarding music.