random things

it’s interesting how you can read or hear about bits of advice over and over yet have no actual experience of them

and then one day, with a flash, a recognition

last week a few art-world truisms flashed at me...

beginning with don't pre-judge something new to you

I did but went ahead with it anyway - using a piece of foam-core as a writing tool for calligraphy

  keep going, even when you think it's hard - the writing marks weren't going well, I kept losing the crispness of the edge but I just kept going, trimming and trimming, then cutting a new piece when the one I was using got too short

don't throw anything away - during the session I saved all the practice papers including the warm-up sheets and ones where I cleaned off excess paint

notice what you notice - when tidying up, stacking the sheets of paper,  I turned one of the sheets to fit on the pile and I noticed something...

once, when cleaning excess ink off the foam core, I had done a quick few scribbles and tap-tap-taps on a small piece of paper to hand - looking at it in a new orientation, it I no longer saw a scribble of scraping ink rather, I saw a landscape

a small house, complete with a chimney

trees, hills, light and shadow

hmm...

I remember the motions of cleaning off the tool, the swift motion of it

seems the best way for me to get a loose expressive drawing might be with a tool not really meant for drawing

less control, more expression

something to remember...

and following on from last week, a few people commented on my practice of photographing and printing my painted sheets to use in collage work so I thought I would show a few examples of how I go about it

first is a sheet of paper I had taped off and then painted each section differently

the paintings came out much darker than I had intended and weren't going to work for what I wanted

(they are actually lighter here than in real life)

for some reason I no longer remember I decided to take a picture of them

on my laptop, I duplicated the image four times and then cropped each one to have a better look

it was then I noticed the range of details I hadn't really seen in the originals

as I had a new lightweight inkjet printer paper by Awagami I printed the first two you see below

the results were wonderful; the paper is beautiful, giving the print a fine, soft texture and it's feather-lightness makes it perfect for collage

after those interesting results I found a piece of cloth I had painted with ink mixed with watercolour

there was a lot of pigment settling so the result was less than hoped for

but after photographing it and playing with some of the edits available in Photos on my Mac I came up with two that worked well: one rather grey, the next with a soft green tint

it takes a fair bit of painting and/or mono-printing for me to get a decent result and in the past I have been hesitant to use them because I know they can never be reproduced but this... this process lets me play as much as I like without fear

there will come a day when I'll know the right thing to use is the original but knowing I will still have the digital versions to work with will allow me to do it gladly

and that is a pleasing thing

take care,

Jillayne