I have a few more examples of where bones might actually take you, this time adding color into the mix. Once you've moved away from your subject matter, which in this case was a group of vertebrae, you're sort of in your own field and you have to make decisions about color because the colors are not there for you to look at. So then it's a question of what kinds of colors do you feel like or do you think will work with this. In this case I stuck to, pretty much, a monochromatic base working with the blue. I have some stronger blue-greens, and then I have some more neutral blue-violets in here, so it's sort of a monochromatic study. And I've also mixed it up; I didn't want to lose the drawing. I wanted the sense of the drawing to be there, I wanted this to be a drawing-painting, not just a painting and not just a drawing, but a drawing-painting, so I used oil on this and thinned it out a lot. I used a lot of mineral spirits; I would take a rag with mineral spirits and just sort of scrub around on it. But here is another version based on the same bones and I came up with something totally different, this time in green and brown which felt a little bit more like the bones might be coming out of the earth for me, and I've started moving into texture to also get the sense of "earthiness". So I applied texture with a pallet knife. This is some of that texture, this is modeling paste out of a jar, an acrylic modeling paste, and then worked with pastels over that. And again, pastels can be smudged, but they can also maintain the sense of the drawing stroke. And this became much more about these contrary movements that I found in the original bone, the sharpness of some of the bones, the edges of the bones, and then the fact that some were going in a vertical direction and some in a horizontal, and trying to come up with something that really worked off of those ideas.
dartworks
Mar 08, 2009
