During my recent class with Zana Clark of Stamp Zia, I had the opportunity to experiment with a watercolor technique and her new stamp designs. You can see the first experiment in this post. Below is a second piece that I started and then finished at home.
I'll take you throuh this one a little differently. This is definitely an example of overworking a piece, and then trying hard to rescue it! What I have to remind myself is something that Zana says: "Nothing is precious!" Meaning, none of my art is so precious and special that I can't throw it away and start over again. As long as I learn from my errors, I'll keep making art and growing as an artist.
Okay: So the big mistake on this one is in the waterlily image. I had really wanted this to be the focal point. But I made two mistakes: 1) I was using my colored pencils on this image at night, in a poorly lit room, so I did not really have a good view of what I was achieving; and 2) I simply overworked the image. I kept at it, and kept at it, and kept worrying over it that it became a dull mess.
Below is a close-up. Yuck!
And since I knew I had ruined this image, I experimented with what would happen if I took bleach to it to remove the watercolor background. The oval in in the lower left shows the effect of bleaching out the color. However, you can see that I pretty much ruined the black stamped image, adn that the colors just got muddy and unpleasant. I also found that this particular fiber paper will break down if you keep at it too much with pencil, particularly if you have a nice sharp point.
So what did I do? I stamped the same waterlily image on white cardstock, and had fun with my colored pencils and a Prisma blending pencil to color it in. Below is a close-up of the result: nice and clear image, with pretty decent shading of color. Much better than above, don't you think?
Since this crisp image now jumped off the page, I tried bleaching both the buddha and the small, round flower medallion. Below is a shot from the back, showing the bleached areas.
And here is the Buddha image, from the front, after coloring with colored pencils, and bleaching out the background color. Not too bad- You may think an odd choice of colors, but I did it to bring in the color from the background in other parts of the piece, to keep the eye moving, and to attempt to balance the colors.
Finally, the whole piece is shown below, with the cleaned up waterlily image.
I kind of like it- but not as well as the image with the nude, that I shared earlier.
So, I am going to keep experimenting, and keep sharing the results! Check back for more!
Comments