
Change of temperature from greenish to orange according to ongoing heatwave in Norway. Getting warmer, both painting and me and Rufus!

Change of temperature from greenish to orange according to ongoing heatwave in Norway. Getting warmer, both painting and me and Rufus!
Monochromatic with sanguine (powder from crayon)
Not very much have happened with these since last time, except for a few more sanguine marks and a little pencil work here and there. I thought however I’d try a kind of paint “framing”, I tried different possibilities out digitally first and ended up with this. I wanted to keep them quiet and to add some more structure to them. Also, since they are so similar, I wanted to make a series out of them. What’s left to do is some smaller adjustments, only carefully placed pencil marks, some fine lines binding the shapes together here and there, perhaps some very small shapes with dense color.
MONOCHROMATIC PLAY STAGE: White&Black + Sanguine
Going larger for these (23X60 cm), not very large you might say, but to me these are the largest papers I’ve worked on so far in the exercise series. So, this is a new round with monochromatic. I had meant to use raw sienna for this set. But then I came over some of my new sketching crayons, including this orange which I used in the initial mark making. This colors is far away from the raw sienna so I had to do some rethinking. Of course, it turned out I didn’t have this color (it turned out to be sanguine) in oils, so I used sanding paper to make powder of the crayon before mixing this into the white.
After a new play stage and some drastic attacks white and light green, I now feel that these are going towards something that I really would like to continue on. Already I am finding portions that I truly love. Gosh, this time this process was far quicker and not so scary, which is a huge relief in itself. If only I don’t mess this up when I move on to clarifying, there is certainly a possibility there as well…
This stage is about searching, finding, trying and failing, covering, discovering, taking risks and finding a path forward for each one of the paintings. In all respects this is a exciting part of the process, to be honest actually a bit nerve wrecking too. Probably because tons of possibilities require tons of decisions to be made =)
This was a surprise, I was going to separate these four to easier finish them one by one. But there it sat, the big old birds head with his eyes peaking into one of the paintings suddenly had a body as well, stretching over two more paintings. This is kind of mysterious because I absolutely worked with each and one of them separately. My focus was on ovals, and curves this time, so I used my flexible curve ruler and larger cut out stencils, and in order to not be too fuzzy, I didn’t care if I crossed the tape. So, what on earth do I do with this bird, it seems too brutal to cut of his head, and it seems not right to leave the tape there either. This is a puzzle, any suggestions? 🤔😲😅