last night tucson was under a tornado watch... highly unusual for us... actually i can't remember ever being under a tornado watch before... and i've lived here since 1971.
i am excited about this new style of painting i'm exploring.... the indian yellow/thio violet wash over a painted sketch.... i have used it on the last two paintings i've done and really liked the resulting little patches of that underpainted warm glow left peeking out here and there.
while painting these last few weeks, i kept glancing around at the half dozen or so paintings in various stages of completion surrounding me in the studio... bigguns and little uns, all abandoned because i wasn't excited about what was happening on the canvas.... it's not unusual for me to put aside a canvas that's not working...could this new style work to bring them back to life?
several of those unfinished canvases kept catching my attention ... they looked like perfect candidates for this new warm wash underpainting i am playing with, even though they were a bit beyond a painted sketch... the biggest drawback was that they already had color on them... and the warm IY/TV wash would look dull over the existing blues on these canvases.... any existing warm and white areas would be just fine with this glaze over them.
this morning i went into my studio and picked up a painting i had started several years ago... a landscape with a tornado about to skip across a rural road....it caught my eye...hmmm....wonder why? ......decided it was the one to be reworked with the warm glazed underpainting.
this old tornado painting needed to be readied for the IY/TV glaze underpainting.....kind of creating an underpainting for an underpainting... not something i usually do, but if this works, maybe those other lonely ole paintings might finally have some attention paid to them too.
unfortunately i forgot to take a photo of this painting as it has looked for over a year, tucked away in a corner of my studio. ...it was simply a very rough washed sketch...it had some dark details with washes of ultramarine blue and alizarin crimson in the sky...the road and fields were washed in warm siennas.
as shown above, i decided to block in white over any areas of blue, to remove as much blue hue as possible ...my reasoning was orange over blue = mud... and i don't want a muddy sky... i also dry brushed white over most of the canvas to soften all the other colors.... i like to see the little canvas nubs created when a dry brush of paint is dragged over it. ....i'm thinking, these little white dots will also become warm when the IY/TV wash is added... of course, this may not work in the real world, but nothing ventured, nothing gained... i mean, after all, this painting has been waiting quite a while to come back to life.
a small hint of blue did still remained after several quick layers of white... but not much, so after letting those layers dry thoroughly, i applied the wash....when i need a layer to dry quickly, i will often times use a blow dryer to speed up the process....can you believe i sometimes need acrylic paint to dry even faster than it does naturally.
here it is with the wash... kinda neat... next session i'll start blocking in the opaque colors, and bring out details, making sure i leave this wash here and there....how much i leave showing will depend on what the painting tells me to leave...i envision the finished work an abstract landscape.... bringing it to life should be FUN!
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