January found me in Florida again taking another collage workshop with Gerald Brommer. The workshop was great, as all his are, but the weather was fabulous too, especially since I left 16 degrees and snow in TN to head "souther" : ). The day after I got back home, more snow fell.....enough already!!! This has been a heck of a winter in the snow dept, but back to workshop blog -- we collaged papers and other things on to a support of illustration board, then gessoed the surface making everything white. On the white gessoed surface we then used watercolors to finish our designs, some abstract, and some realistic. I have lots of new starts and even more ideas of how to finish and/or make more collages. Now if i could just adhere papers to the surfaces as fast as i can dream up ideas. I am working on some totally new pieces and am reworking an old one. The old one is a rhino that i did in watercolor and now am collaging over the watercolor, changing my previous rhino from the kind with the really long horns to the variety that appears to be amored.....the old rhino had to loose the long horns in the process as the rhinos with the armor have a single rather short fat horn and not the long variety. Here is his "before" picture............. This is the watercolor I began to use for this project. I will post an "in progress" pic as soon as I get some more texture on him. You probably wont recognize him later. I enlarged the pic so you could more easily see the added textures. Note he has lost his big horn and now has only one small horn. I also enlarged his ears. I added a speckled paper to the background. On the rhino I added several different kinds of papers for the texture -- the brownish is a heavy weight paper with visible fiber strand texture. The white area on the rhino is a combination of white pebble textured papers, including some paper napkins. I used a combination of the paper napkins and plain tissue for the face. The heavy ridges of the armor plate edges and some of the folds of his skin are created using a thick cotton string. The finer ridges are rolled tissue paper. I left the watercolor area at the bottom section of the painting untouched for now. In the pic you can see I have gessoed over all of the rhino. Looking closely you can see the "bumps" on his armor on his side and parts if his leg. At this point you can still see remnants of the watercoloring on his face. I did not put gesso on the speckled backround paper as I want the speckles to show through more on the background than they would if a put gesso over them -- this could change later... I also did not put any gesso on the bottom section before i took the pic to make it easier for you to see the contrast between that and the rhino. After I took the picture, I did gesso over the watercolor at the bottom. Starting to look like a rhino in an explosion at the confetti factory : ) Since the last pic, I gessoed the lower "ground" portion of the painting. then added some paint -- I was not pleased with that, so I collaged more paper with a stringy texture in it over the painted gesso. I also added lots of layers of color to the rhino itself. There is more work to be done on the entire painting, but he is coming along and I am pleased with its progress to this point. The rhino's head wasnt big enough. While enlarging his head, it got very dark, so to lighten it to go with the rest of his body (that i liked) his face got a coat of thin gesso or thinned white acrylic paint. I also thought he looked mighty lonely so I gave him a couple yellow-bellied ox peckers to keep him company, and add a little interest to the composition. Here you can see I have repainted his face, lightening it up some to go better with his body coloring. Seeing Eye to Eye This is the final version. I have added some more paper that I colored with watercolor paint, and have tweaked a few other areas like the dark area of his neck, and shaded a few areas. I have also given him a title: Seeing Eye to Eye. I hope you have enjoyed the evolution of this layered paper with watermedia work. Doesnt look much like he did when he was just a watercolor!
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ChristineChristine is a dedicated artist currently living in Tennessee. Archives
March 2021
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