in case you don’t know, Kristi Scheuler has reworked her Creation Quotation newsletter into a blog and started it back up.
this weeks exercise is from the quote:
“Creativity makes a leap, then looks to see where it is.”
– Mason Cooley, City Aphorisms, Eighth Selection, New York (1991)
so, without further ado… my leap and where I landed:
i started when I saw a piece of artwork that inspired me. my first thought was, I bet that’s a resist process… and so a decided to run with it and started grabbing materials to try to replicate it. instead of my usual experimenting process of lots of little tests to see what worked, I dove right in. I decided that the original piece looked like it was water soluble oil pastels (bright vivid colors) and the resist parts looked scribbled in like they might be colored pencil…
so I grabbed some watercolor paper and my pastels and pencils. I sketched out the bones of my design quickly (time counts in this exercise!) and started filling in the hearts with the white pencil. when that was done, I went wild with the oil pastels. unfortunately, I was inconsistant with how much I blended with water before blotting off the hearts. the white pencil does work as a resist, but my end result was uneven and not the look I had been hoping for. I was very happy with the vivid colors and the over all design… just not happy with the resist process. but I was happy I had tried it out in this way.
i was about to stop there, because that was the exercise I had planned… but then the thought popped into my head that maybe I could gesso over those hearts… and in the process create some interesting texture… remembering the quote that this lesson was based on, I decided to stop thinking and dive in. the scanner loses all the texture created *whah*. the scan looks really washed out… but the result in person is very nice. I was very happy with this piece.
as I was scanning it in to post, I started to think it needed something just a bit more to pop. I wondered what would it look like if I outlined in black… and as soon as I thought that, my inner critic warned me about ruining it. well, that just reminded me again about taking that leap… and I decided to do it.
again, I was really happy with the result. I scanned it in and sat down to start posting about it… and noticed a few little scherenschnitte cuttings siting on my desk looking for a home. they were little pieces I did as experiments in designs and had no purpose for yet. I decided to lay one over the heart and see how it looked. I loved it – but it was too wide. so I grabbed my freezer paper and sketched out a truncated version that fit the large heart design. perfect!
if I had planned this out better from the start, I wouldn’t have the scherenschnitte cutting overlapping the white heart like that… but if I had planned this out from the beginning, I never would have combined these different processes together.
now I’m all excited and filled with ideas for combining some oil pastel designs with scherenschnitte cuttings!
(click on any of the thumbnails to see larger versions)
