Rabbitform

This painting took three tries. The first one was the right technique but the wrong color, the second one was the right color but the wrong composition, and this one isn’t quite the right technique, but bugger if I was starting it a fourth time.

While this wasn’t quite the technique I had wanted to use, I think it’s interesting and might be worth pursuing in another context. Initially I did a set of washes on clayboard and drew over them–I screwed up the colors and had to start over.  Next I did a single wash over illustration board, so the base color would by god be uniform–that would have worked if it had been a uniform wash, and if I’d done the cactus darker, but I didn’t, and wound up with some really weird issues with pale cactus and it was all just sort of maddening. So I screamed “Damnit, I have technology to fix this!” and scanned the sketch and colored it (rather loosely) in big splotches of blues and purples, and printed THAT out, and sealed it over the piece of offending illustration board, coated it with clear gesso, and set to work with pen and colored pencil to refine it into something worthwhile.

Because it printed rather darker than I was expecting, I wound up using colored pencil to lighten it in a lot of places. Which is an interesting technique, and gets a cool texture–I may have to try it again. Mind you, it wasn’t what I initially intended to do with this piece, but the notion of starting the damn thing a fourth time made me want to run screaming into the night, so I decided to finish it as is.

Prints are available, as always, and the original is for sale. (At 10 x 18, it’s a pretty big piece…)