Personal Development – Project 2: Adding other materials

Exercise 1: Preparing a textured ground

For this exercise I want to see if I can incorporate these techniques into my personal style of painting.

 

I began by doing a couple of experiments in my sketchbook. I cut up some string and mixed it with gesso, stuck some dried daffodil flower heads and some lengths of string in my sketchbook. I then painted over half of these with grey paint to see what they looked like.

Next I did a couple of sketches in my book to get a feel for a composition. I am thinking of a landscape with water and trees. My first sketch has a tree on the left, water in the middle with trees in the distance and grasses in the foreground. My next sketch had a mountain and sea in the distance with a large tree on the right and rocky steps and plants on the left. It is this composition I am going to work with.

On A3 acrylic paper I layered newspaper for the mountain and the stuck down the daffodil flowers for the tree on the left. Cut up sandpaper was used for the steps and the gesso with string for the area of plants. I then painted some pva glue for the sea. I have used an incredibly heavy application of glue and gesso so this may take some time to dry before I can work on it.

Once the glue and gesso was dry enough to keep the materials in place, I over-painted with another thick layer of gesso. Smooth brush strokes were used for the sky and sea, dabbing motions around the tree and foliage and a pallet knife for the steps. The gesso is so thick it could take a day or so to dry properly and so I will leave this for the moment and move onto other exercises.

I chose a pallet of pinky oranges and greeny blues for this. I started with the sky putting in a sunset then added the mountains and sea with a mixture of Phthalo blue and white. Using a very large brush, I stippled Hookers green and raw umber over the foliage leaving some of the ground underneath showing through.

With the blue and brown I put in the rocky uneven steps with a wide flat brush. I wanted to bring some of the colour from the sky into the rest of the picture so added some pink and orange reflecting off the top of the rocks and also added in an indication of flowers.

Stepping back, I felt the sky was a little too strong and so I finally added a little blue and white over the sea, bottom of the mountains and sky to give the appearance of mist.

I have to be totally honest and say this is not really my type of painting. It’s a little too garish and clumsy of my taste. Detail was hard to achieve on such a heavy ground and I instinctively worked quickly and loosely over these areas. I feel it was better in its earlier stages before I added more colour to the foliage. Whilst I don’t really like the end result, I did enjoy the process. I can see that interesting texture can be created using different materials and, whilst I would steer away from anything quite as heavy as I have used in this painting, I can see a use for this technique in future work, particularly soft landscapes.

Exercise 2: Mixing materials into paint

I have prepared a couple of pages in my sketchbook for this exercise with gesso. I then got a collection of ingredients together to mix with acrylic paint; salt, rice, oats, flour, eggshells and giant couscous.

I started with the salt using raw sienna paint. This led to a very sandy texture but I found that it made the paint so thick that I needed to apply it with a pallet knife. The rice, using light blue and the oats in yellow oxide were also so thick that the pallet knife came out. I daren’t dilute the paint for fear that the heavier materials will not stick to the paper. The oats had potential, perhaps as pebbles on a beach.

For the fourth experiment using flour, I decided to give up the idea of putting the paint down with a brush. The flour thickened the aqua green paint and gave it a stucco feel and look. I liked the texture it brought to the paint and the fact that you could ‘rough it up.’

The last two were perhaps the hardest to apply; eggshells with purple paint and giant couscous in red. The eggshell would work well for a path but I am not sure that the couscous has been too successful. I have decided to wait for the paint to dry before seeing what effects I can get with a second coat as the larger grains are moving around easily when wet. I have a bronze yellow acrylic which I will use for all six textures.

I then painted over the material with the bronze yellow; to be honest not the nicest colour in the world! I think the best results occurred with the flour and couscous.

My eldest saw me doing this. As an ex teacher he said I might as well just stick pasta to the paper like everyone did at school and I did slightly agree with him. My analogy above referred to using the techniques in a landscape setting and I do wonder whether I would have benefited from doing these exercises before Part 4. The flour and salt mixes may have been particularly useful on the foreground of my Assignment painting but I just simply didn’t think of it.