winter song
I can’t resist resist
I lately stumbled back into playing with wax resist techniques in my daily drawings. It’s been a while since I dug into this, and my daily drawings are giving me a chance to do some more focused exploration into how to get the results that I like. I’m still a ways from satisfied, but the journey is great fun. I took some snapshots as I went along on one of my recent drawings to give an idea of my process.
The first layer is colors ( I think water colors in this case) and lines drawn with hard (8h) pencil. A layer of Neocolor I crayons (the non-water-soluble kind) and/or oil pastels goes over that.
That gets covered with ink. In some drawings I use watercolor instead.
The ink gets scraped off after it’s dry. This is the “uncovering buried treasure” part of the drawing that I enjoy so much. Sorry about the unfocused photo!
In this drawing I wanted to play with scratchboard techniques, so I went back over some parts with more ink.
Here is about where I ended up.
One side effect of my recent run of resists is that I got time to finish up a drawing I started last summer, while waiting for the ink to dry. I was looking at “zen tangles” with my sister-in-law, and drew a couple of line drawings to fill in with patterns. More dancing princesses!
…..And… here are the drawings I posted in the past week all in a bunch:
2 November 2016
More resist. I don’t feel like this one is finished, but I ran out of time.
Update: I had some more time
1 November 2016
tutus are not just for dancing princesses
31 October 2016
30 October 2016
buddies
29 October 2016
Perhaps inevitably, ink resist leads to scratchboard
28 October 2016
27 October 2016
I saw an owl in the woods today.
Princesses are Blockade Runners.
For a while I was embarrassed about drawing pretty girls in fancy clothes. One of my inner critics insists that this is schoolgirl doodling, not Serious Art. This well educated voice informs me that Art should be intelligent and provocative. My unpolished splats of drawings do not really count. I should not show anything unless it could rise to some level of professionalism, and I could write an essay about it that would be worthy of Art Journals and Galleries.
If I listened to this critic, I would just give up. What they want is not even something I want to do, never mind feel capable of. This critic informed me for years that I would never be a Real Artist.
My Princesses are blockade runners.
Sometimes they help me get a drawing done when I’m stuck on the blank page. They remind me to get over myself and purely have some fun with the drawing. If I’m thinking that Art is hard and Artists have to be a lot smarter, more focussed, more talented than I am, a Princess can remind me that the task at hand is not to be great but to get something onto the paper.
Princesses emerge to please the child that loved The Princess and the Goblin, The Rose and the Ring, the Blue Fairy Book, The Secret Garden, The Silver Curlew.
They please the little girl who wanted to be a vallerina, and dance, and make everyone happy, happy, happy. (Which is the origin of my secret fascination with tutus – the kind that stick straight out like an Elizabethan ruff).
They remind me not to take myself and my drawing practice so seriously. That little girl is still in me, wanting to dance and laugh and sing all the livelong day. These days she’s trying to keep her joyful presence where I can always reach it, even through the anxiety, fatigue, pain, sorrow and irritation that seem to be such ready companions.
Here are my drawings from the past week:
eyespider 