2. HOMEWORK FOR 24.04.2021

As given by Frances on 12.04.2021

FOCUS: LIVING TISSUE

MATERIAL RESEARCH: explore further the potential of charcoal as a medium:

Select bark of your choice and explore these following techniques:  

CHARCOAL

  1. WASH excess powder off charcoal drawing IN PUDDLE/ LAKE/ WATERING CAN
  2. CRUSH charcoal and make into paint with acrylic medium / gum Arabic
  3. CRUSH and then apply with rag or hands
  4. COVER WHOLE PAGE WITH BLACK CHARCOAL – lift out drawing with soft white cheap bread kneaded into a rubber…so you are working from dark to light. 
  5. CREATE DEPTH OF FIELD only using charcoal…very very pale to very very dark and all in-betweens. Whole octaves.
  6. CREATE DEPTH by placing forms on top of forms.

Focus on the quality of aliveness of the tree barks.

We are working TONALLY– we are making abstract drawing in response to the quality of ‘living tissue’ of the tree details.

Make 10-15 images

replace PY 40 Aureolin and PY35 Cadmium Yellow Light with:

PY3- Lemon Yellow and Indian Yellow (Marianna’s choices) for wider palette breadth

I am waiting for the indian yellow, the PY3 and the PR122 to arrive. In the meantime I will work with what I have and coal. This did not start well; I did not get in the mood for abstracts and I am not sure I know what is meant with living tissue applied to bark – I am unable to distinguish living from non living tissue in a bark so I will just focus on barks and try to go in the direction of abstracts, which in the first 3 days was no very successful….

19.4.2021: very uninspired week.

22.04: the Indian yellow arrived and it is beautiful, it must be the green gold in it, just beautiful! PR122 is also OK, but the yellow …a bit disappointing because I bought the wrong one!!!.

What I have learned:

  1. Pigments are very different from vendor to vendor and it can be confusing and overwhleming to order them online because not every online store here in Germany has all the pigments. I thought I was buying Daniel Smith PY3 from Gaestäcker but when I received it it says the “Cadmium Yellow Light Hue” is a mix of 3 yellows: PY3, PY 138 and PY53. Disappointing. Even when one Vendor uses just one pigment, they can call it differently than the same pigment from another Vendor or the concentration can be different, the chemical treatment, so one never really knows what one is buying unless it is always pigments one know from the same vendor. One more reason for a limited palette!!
  2. Payne’s Grey which is a color I like a lot – can be made in several ways, the traditional one was to mix Prussian Blue + PR and Yellow ocra, although today it is mostly made with a charcoal black and blue ultramarine. This led me to try crushed charcoal with ultramarine, which is a beautiful Payne’s grey I will be using in the exercizes. Or so I thought. I am unable to crush the charcoal fine enough to really make it work…Next time I will mix a charcoal from the tube.
  3. I like to draw and experiment in charcoal but after a while I need to use color again.
  4. I need more space, I spend too much time trying to keep some space on my desk to paint. It is very very hard for me, which generally have no problem keeping some kind of order.

Questions for Frances:

charcoal use

her paintings

how big is her studio and how did she have her furniture made

how to use the paper or cardboard again after something went wrong (cover it with which material?)

ideas on how to represent the mushrooms at the bottom

Butterfly bark
Crushed bark and made entire thing as dark as possible and erased with bread and other stuff .
The second eye bark
Crushed and diluted charcoal + dry charcoal for drawings
Lion bark
I do not dislike it but I lost the angle of the face, which shold be slanted towards the left and would have been more interesting.
golden sea bark
Golden sea nr 1
Golden sea nr 3
It does not have to be the same thing! The two I like the most are 1 and 3

washed out version
Moody bark
I thought this was dark enough but it is not even close. Will redo. Crushed and grated charcoal on watercolor paper. Used candle wax as resist.
Sunrise bark
designed with charcoal, washed out and redefined with charcoal and black non waterproof ink – ink was a mistake.
Multi apartments bark
grated charcoal on entire sheet, then from dark to light with bread and other stuff
grated charcoal and spread over entire page and then lifted with bread.
Canyon bark
Shady bark
I have not been able to reproduc the 4 basic tones: the light background is OK but then there is the darker tone for the real leaves, the even darker and blurred tone for the shades of the leaves and the dark dark hard edged tone for the shades of the bark in the bark. Will try again.
Take two and no progress (to be honest, I like it less than the first try!).. I am going to try this in watercolor, for some reason I like this picture and I want to try and get it right.
it looks slighly more interesting in color but I still did not achieve one of the things I was after and which IMO makes the rythm, = shadow leaves are fuzzy but actual leaves are not. Here everything is fuzzy! RE-DO.
Fourth and last try – did not completely succeed but I am leaving good enough alone.
trameles versicolor bark
Landscapy bark
Crushed coal, water, some gum arabic and some cerulean.