I SAVED THE BEST FOR LAST!

DEMO DAY 4 BROOKINGS WORKSHOP

DETAIL DEMO DAY 4 BROOKINGS WORKSHOP

This was my favorite demo from the workshop.  I love when happy surprises show up unexpectedly.  Pretty boring if you know exactly what you are going to get before you even start.  I start with an idea and have a mental picture of what I think it will be like.  Of course, that never happens, but I have a direction.  In this case, I have been working on putting gesso on part of an old painting, stamping into the gesso and transferring that gesso pattern onto the rest of the painting so that part of the old painting shows through the stamped pattern.  This time my idea was to gesso the general shape of the image I planned to paint and stamp the rest of the page, thus having more of the old painting showing through and having a total white space for my new image.  The old painting was on YUPPO from a George James workshop I took.  The surface was covered with watercolor and in some areas heavy concentration of watercolor.  Watercolor on YUPPO can be easily activated by moisture because it is just sitting on the surface, nothing has been absorbed into the plastic paper.  The old painting color scheme was complementary with Indigo and Brown Madder (a low intensity red orange).  My new color scheme was a different version of blue/orange compliments.  

Here is where the serendipity came in.  As I scraped the gesso over the old paint, it became activated and some of it mixed with the gesso.  Then, when I painted over the background, the old color activated and mingled with the new color  resulting in some beautiful color I will never be able to recreate again!  I drew the image with walnut ink, a water soluble material, because I wanted to be able to make corrections is necessary.  I love the edges that are created when painted over or next to.  

Now, where are those other cast aside paintings from the GJ workshop?  I want to do this again!