Skyfall

After a bit of a break from them, I picked up the paints again yesterday.  I couldn’t decide what to paint is thought I’d start with some random abstract stuff and hope that something popped out of it.  The first step was to spatter on some masking fluid.  I was near the end of the bottle and wanted to finish it off, so I was quite heavy handed, even pouring a bit on at one point.  I also used a small brush (an old one that I only ever use with masking fluid) to join some of the blobs together just for the hell of it.  Here’s what I ended up with:

Once that was dry, I wet it all over and chucked on some random paint.  I used warm and cool versions of all three primaries, so this isn’t in any particular key.  I was using the experimental palette and went with lemon yellow, Winsor orange (which I was counting as a warm yellow), Winsor red, permanent rose, French ultramarine and Winsor blue (green shade) which every other paint manufacturer calls pthalo blue.  I also dropped in a little bit of Winsor violet, permanent sap green and olive green just for the hell of it.  In doing this I tried to keep colours generally cool on one side and warm on the other.  Finally I sprinkled on some salt in places, then covered up about two thirds of the painting in French stick wrapper, squeezed the wrapper around a bit, weighed it down and left it to dry:

And here’s what I ended up with:

And that’s where I stopped for the day, giving myself time to look for ideas within the painting.  I guess this way round there might be a tree in the bottom right with a forest pixie leaping over it but forest pixies aren’t my sort of thing.  One of my nieces suggested turning it upside down to end up with some trees on the right and yellow mountains in the middle but this felt like the sort of thing that might have worked best as a suggestion and that might have been ruined by being brought out.  There are no hidden gorillas or Brazilian villages there, though, so this represents quite a challenge.

It’s worth pointing out at this point that there are some textural successes there.  There’s a salt-induced snowstorm in the bottom right, some interesting back runs along the top, something looking like a stitch in the top right and some sharp edges and spotty treadmarks from the French stick wrapper at the bottom.

So with no obvious shapes to bring out in the painting, I thought I’d add a silhouette to it.  Going through the ideas I’d collected, I found a still from Skyfall and used that.  The three colours I used in this final stage were French ultramarine, Winsor orange and permanent rose (after checking that they mixed to give a decent neutral colour).  I put in two rows of grasses, the top row with some of the ultramarine and some of the rose and the bottom row with ultramarine.  I mixed together all three primaries for the figure, varying the mix as I went along and trying to make it more blue at the bottom so I could blend it into the blue grass layer.

It was looking a bit empty, so I added a couple of trees in the neutral mix, making the one on the left more violet and the one on the right more green.  And then I was left with the issue of all those empty white streaks.  I decided to add a bit of random colour to them using all six initial primaries.  What I’ve ended up with isn’t perfect but is an improvement.  I guess it could look like flames or an explosion.  Oh, and I added more salt because, well, salt.

What I’ve ended up with something that’s just different.  What is it supposed to be?  Let the viewer decide.  I know a lot of viewers will decide it’s Wolverine and I’m not going to argue with that.  This one’s up for sale.