One For The Bin

All my artwork, good or bad, goes up on this website.  That’s why I’m showing you this abomination.

I saw a Jean Lurssen video this morning in which she started off with a blue and yellow underpainting, then spattered on some inks and ended up with something amazing, looking like a closeup of a bit of hedgerow.  I thought I’d have a go at something similar.

I started off OK, with an underpainting of French ultramarine, raw sienna and burnt sienna.  But I felt like adding some green, so I added some green inks in the middle, along with granulation medium.  And there was too much green, so I had to blot lots of it out.  Then, when I tried spattering the ink using a palette knife, I found the ink was too watery.  It didn’t spatter like Jean’s.  In the end, I managed some spattering using a toothbrush but it wasn’t great.

I knew this painting was going downhill fast, so I tried adding loads of ink and granulation medium to try to turn it into one of my textured cliffsides.  This kind of worked, but I still wasn’t happy.  The sky had lots of green and spatters in it, which didn’t make sense, so I tried adding some trees.  It just made things worse.  So finally I experimented by glazing the sky all over with transparent yellow and the hills with burnt sienna.  While the painting was still horrible, the glazing wasn’t too bad and I may try that again another time.  But I need to remember to make sure any white ink is dry because if it isn’t, it turns everything milky.

Oh, and there’s some decent texture in the hills. That came from using too much ink and having to dab it dry with a paper towel.  Again something to note for another day.

This one’s for the bin