Egyptian Sorcery

I started with some inktense sticks, running them across all the cracked areas, wetting them and wiping off the ink, leaving the cracks coloured in.  That was a handy discovery.

Looking at the shape of the cracks, I could see a landscape with tree trunks on the right if I held the board a certain way up, so went with that.  My plan today was to give the desert supergranulators a run, so that’s what I did, using the yellow, orange and brown in the foreground and the green and grey in the tree trunks and in the area above them.

After that, I did a lot of tinkering.  I don’t know what it is about these crackle pasted boards but they seem to soak up paint.  I keep putting more paint on but the values never get any darker.  After I got fed up putting on more of the desert colours, I turned to cerulean blue to liven up the sky a little, cadmium red (which, to be fair, already appears within two of the desert colours) in the sky and foreground and a bit of cadmium yellow in the foreground.  These did succeed in livening things up slightly.  I also tried a bit of forest brown in the leafy area above the tree trunks.  With the tree, I could see a strange figure emerging with raised arms, so I did what I could to bring her out further, throwing on more of the greens and dabbing paint off around her.  And I just kept tinkering, adding more of these colours, dabbing stuff out and dripping on the odd bit of granulating medium until I recognised that things weren’t ever going to improve.  So that’s when I stopped.

I guess there are interesting colours and effects there but that’s all.  It’s some where between abstract and representative but failing in both counts, whereas my better ones on crackle pasted boards have passed on both.  So, yeah, I’m not liking this one enough to put it in the shop window.

Time now for my daily power walk, a bit of reading, then settling down for the West Ham match.  No painting tomorrow as the guy from last week is back to replace a couple more doors.