Hi! We’re back to Monday it appears. I am now behind showing you two pieces of the Daily Art Challenge. The first one was still wet when I had the chance to blog, and the second one was lucky to get done at all. I’ve had a series of home services around here necessitating workers in the house and prep to have them in. Today an expected half hour job turned into 2 hours of pet management (or wrangling)?
I wanted to laser print one of my photos onto the Rives BFK® Printmaking paper and experiment with various watercolor media I pulled out yesterday. I vaguely thought of something moderately detailed that could use a range of colors, sort of like a coloring book page. As usual the huge archive of photos I have, most of which suck for numerous reasons, took me forever to look through. The clock, people. One jumped out at me. It is a photo of a painting I did in 2008 that appears in a separate blog entry. I had cropped just the uppermost of the painting and altered it with Stencil filter. Like I need another stencil image. Of course, it wasn’t suitable at all for what I had intended to do, but I decided to give it a go. It’s been so darn long since I’ve done any alternative sized paper printing that I couldn’t get the image to print properly. All I could get to was one side of the pix on the edge of the page. I messed with that for too long (clock, people) and had the brainstorm, or braincramp (which fits better) to create a reverse of the side that did print. Like a harlequin outfit.
I was stuck on using the water media idea. I thoughtfully prepared a sample palette of all my Derwent® and Prismacolor® watercolor pencils and my Caran d’Ache® watercolor crayons last evening. The Prismacolor® pencil set seemed to have the darkest black in my collection but it wasn’t black enough. No matter what white media I tried it would not get truly white over the black. Suffice it to say that I went through a series of gyrations that are too troubling to detail here. I’m glad it’s over. Clock, people (works both ways).
If you recall, the rules of the Daily Art Challenge are that the image has to be finished (or quit) in one hour and it has to be 5×7 with a paper foundation. My time machine is broken, but if it wasn’t, I’d start again and make a Photoshop® digital image. Crop the one I started with in half. Apply “Invert Color” to it, save it. Open a blank document, move the b/w copy up to the w/b copy, save as a new file, print it on 5×7. Then I’d doodle or stencil or something over the top of that. Much easier to work with paint/marker on top of the laser toner as opposed to black paint. It would have been more creative, less frustrating and better looking by far. Of course, I still haven’t solved the inability to print it correctly, that is for Bob or another day.
I did not know about David Bowie’s illness and was sorry to hear of his death today. I’ve enjoyed his music for decades–he was an amazing multimedia creative talent. One of my favorite songs is his “Putting Out Fire,” the theme from the movie Cat People.
Crickyn 