Studio Time

I’ve been working on this sketch for quite some time now. I finished it yesterday. At least it’s finished enough to serve it’s purpose as a sketch. It gives me enough information to move on to color. I’m still going to need to come to some sort of understanding with a few of the linear elements.

This is fairly large… 36×48 inches. It’s canvas adhered to a hardboard panel with acrylic medium. The canvas isn’t primed. I prefer drawing on raw canvas… It’s an amazing surface for pastels, charcoal, graphite and so on. This is done with watercolor pencils and water-soluble graphite. I’ve misted it with a spray bottle so that the pigment soaks into the canvas… a bit like a dye.

Next step is to seal the whole thing with gloss acrylic medium. I’ll probably block in a few forms with acrylic paint then move on to oils.

This began life as an automatic drawing. The forms and so forth come about through interpretation of it. Dali did something similar with his Paranoiac-critical method, Ernst built his grattage and frottage stuff by interpreting rubbings and blobs of paint. You’ve probably done it when you looked for faces, elephants, demons, wizards and so on in clouds or wood grain.

This actually had some intent behind it. I wanted to represent chaos in a sort of street scene. The straight lines allow me to work in some sort of architectural elements. 🙂 Whether that will come across in the final painting or not remains to be seen.