Awe 8-25-13

I have been working on "Awe" from time to time but the changes are hard to see so I have not been logging my progress as much now. Even so, other artwork, my job, and all kinds of real and imaginary things have somehow gravitated to the top of the priority list and Awe languishes on the easel for most of the spring and summer. But I made a commitment to myself that this would be finished by mid-September, and I think that is probably a manageable goal. I am fairly pleased with this painting, and I think I have worked out all the problems. Those white edges on the flowers have been a real tricky problem of getting the values right, and I have painted them over several times and I have to keep greying down that white, so much I can't believe it, but still they read white from a distance. I worked for quite awhile on the violin and I think I finally have the perspective of the bridge right now...for a long time it was flipping all over the place as I would walk by it. I had it so slightly off that the thing would appear to move...weird stuff like that drives me crazy.

I have one more run through that will solidify the background sky and sunset, which I am avoiding, but I almost got into it today, but decided other things were more important. I need to work a bit more on the scrollwork of the table and a bit more on the drapery. So...stay tuned...will Gainor meet her deadline? 

Monotype Demonstration Last Night

I was asked to do a Monotype workshop for Tampa Regional Artists last night in Hyde Park. I must admit that I spent two intense days preparing for this, as it is not easy to pull prints in front of an audience and have the presentation flow properly. I had approximately one hour to show them a couple of types of Monotypes. I have been doing hand printed oil paint Montypes for many years and I would have no trouble doing one of them, but it takes quite a few hours to actually paint it properly, and I didn't want to have them sit through watching me paint, so I prepared the plate at home and hoped that it would stay wet for long enough to get it to South Tampa. As it turned out it did stay wet but I also had to soak a couple of my printing papers for quite a long time, and the container of water dumped all over the floor of my car on the way to Tampa. It was soaking wet this morning and I hoped a spray of vinegar would deter the mildew from growing under the passenger seat of my car.

Anyway, the demonstration turned out well and the two types of Monotypes that I had minimal experience with also were fine. One was using water based Createx paint which I had never done before. I actually painted the plate the day before the demonstration and the directions say that you should let it dry completely before printing it. It suffered a bit of damage on the way which I fixed when I got to TRA. The final technique is a traced Monotype which uses water based block printing ink, rolled out on a plate. The paper is then placed carefully over the ink. Not touching the paper at all I set up a "bridge" as a hand rest. The idea is to either make the image on the back of the paper, or tracing over a pre-prepared drawing. In this case I did the latter, and had a drawing on tracing paper that I carefully traced. Then I used a rubber tipped tool to add shading to the drawing. The three examples are below.

Oil Painting Monotype

 Watercolor Monotype

Traced Monotype