P.U.I.
8 x 10", Acrylic on Canvas
11 April 2009
This is a piece I started tonight. The main foci for this piece are to first play with some formal geometric composition ideas and then to experiment with combining brushwork of various amounts of looseness. At this point, I've completed the composition to my satisfaction and blocked in an underpainting in two tones, using Prussian Blue (and Titanium White).
It's stark and formal at the moment, and I plan for the separation of the areas to be sharp in the finished painting. The corner areas I'm going to paint loose color gradations in to, and the white areas I plan to keep a bit more controlled. I'm not sure what I'll do with the center three pieces. They're the wildcards here—I'm not even 100% happy with their shapes at the moment. I'm feeling that I'll need to do another session with white and blue to get those shapes really defined and complete the underpainting.
12 April 2009
I'm trying to develop a discipline about painting regularly. I've never been particularly good at that sort of thing, but the effort helps. Tonight I did about an hour, filling in the large corner areas. I had thought I would work on the center underpainting before this, but apparently when I got started I wanted to do this more.
Most of my session was spent thinking about and concerning myself with paint mixing...keeping my colors clean and making sure the mixtures had the right consistency, fluidity, and translucency.
I also ran into a few problems with things drying on the canvas before I had painted over/into them, so I worked quickly once I started in an area. The other option would have been to add a retarder to my paint, so it didn't dry quite so fast. This would have fed back into my paint-mixing concerns, though. The quick working helped to keep me loose and to keep me from overworking the areas.
14 April 2009
Today I started by sharpening up all the shapes and borders.
Then, after some thought, I decided on a light blue for the area that was white in the underpainting. I wanted to get a lighter blue than I ended up with, so I'll have to paint it over. I'm considering trying a white-to-blue gradient of some sort...but not the same sort as the red-to-yellow.
7 May 2009 (or thereabouts)
I worked white into the painting, outlining the dark central shapes and adding some trails and dots and whatnot. This wasn't what I had expected to do, or at least the trails and whatnot wasn't. I'm currently undecided about whether to soften the outer edges of the white outlines.
I'll have to let it sit a little while before deciding what to do with it...that'll give me some time to let the ideas percolate.