Wax On, Wax Off

Over the past couple of months what studio time I have been able to spend has almost exclusively been focused on work for phase two of the green project. I wanted to use shapes that made sense with the color green but were still abstracted, sharply graphic so that the focus was on the color and contrast rather than how well objects were rendered.

It began with laying out a cartoon:

Green Project Layout
Brown Craft Paper, Pencil, Plastic Vines

Then was the painstaking process of perforating the cartoon for transfer to canvas:

Green Project Layout
Brown Craft Paper, Pencil

This was followed by the transfer to nine 18" x 24" canvases using charcoal dust:

Transfer of cartoon to canvas with charcoal

 Then came blocking the background color on each of the nine canvases:

Work In Progress
Oil On Canvas

The first pass at the background color took between four and five hours per canvas. The charcoal dust that I was unable to brush away before beginning tended to dull the background color a bit, so I ended up doing a second coat on each canvas.

While spending almost seventy hours just completing a solid color background for this series may sound tedious, I did not find it so. Meticulously outlining each leaf and vine, over and over again had the benefit of giving me much greater brush control. I learned to judge the amount of walnut oil I needed to add by how much resistance the palette knife gave as it moved through the paint. I got much better at accurately assessing how much paint I needed to cover a certain amount of canvas. By the end I was quicker and more certain in my use of the brush. Getting that experience and muscle memory was invaluable and the challenge of doing it well kept it interesting all along.

A couple of weeks ago I began with the green. Each canvas is an exploration of the range of green possible using a single Blue and a single Yellow. I started with Pthalo Blue and Yellow Ochre:

Green II.1
Oil On Canvas

This was a learning experience on a couple of fronts, and once I have used what I learned on the other eight canvases I plan to return to this one and retouch it a bit.

Things have been a bit hectic with my day job, and I have come out of retirement from theatrical design, but those are tales for another time.

Peace in yer crease.