Monday, July 17, 2006

Nipper Eyes

I’m sorry it’s been so long since the last update. I have been painting with a view to getting some things finished. Painting is time consuming.



I’ve thought about posting stuff that isn’t my work, but then I thought that might get confusing and I like the purity of this blog.



I’ll give you some boring updates on things I had already started last time first.



Like I’ve been working on this monster painting with lots of red and green and yellow. I remember thinking when I chose the palette that I wanted the red and green to rub up together in an optically awkward way. There’s too much yellow in it at the moment, I plan to make it more cloudy and moody. Then when I’ve finished it I’m going to do something I’m more in the moment and passionate about. This is a strange exercise in problem solving at the moment, but it is improving as I persevere.
















Then there was that pink ink one which I’ve ruined by putting other stuff on top. But it will get better before it’s finished.





And the one with the wrestling and the orc and the by now familiar cat man… This one will look a lot different by the end too. This is more sandy. The other one was more wiggly. It’s got everything and the kitchen sink in this one.





Then the bat one, that has grown. It’s acquired some colour and some new pecs. This is part of my perverse wrestling imagery Chloe revolution reaching beyond the comfort based tyrannically cool school of imagery choosing and reaching toward the transcendent power of enriched vision beyond culture. And it has a bat.






I wanted to get to grips with the somewhat fascinating graceless rectangularity of John Cena, as those of you who vaguely follow the incoherent babblings of my grey blog may know. So I started drawing him, I started the big one in the bottom right corner wanting it to be purely done with coloured pencil since I hadn’t tried that for a while. But I felt I copped out when used watercolour and ink too. Also it looked too conventional or professional or something, not very interesting. Because he already looks like a cartoon or an action figure, there’s nothing clever about this drawing really. If there are elements of him which are unedifying, I wanted to try and make my drawings in some sense edifying despite the odds.






So what I did was I redid that entire page almost purely in coloured pencil, to see if I could take it to somewhere more interesting and uncover my purpose a little bit more.





In the top centre one, in his eyes I made him look a bit like me age three and apprehensive about being photographed. My motherly instincts and compassion seeped out, I couldn’t make him entirely hideous.

And working in coloured pencil took me back to age thirteen when they were my main medium. The memories were surprisingly potent. That was an age when I significantly started developing my own ‘techniques’, which had been a private milestone, I realised. I’m quite soft and gentle with them, which is interesting as a counterpoint to all the other media I’m using in less puritanical ways. I’m re-educating my seeing at the moment.

5 comments:

Gabriel said...

Let's make up and be friendly.

I really like the pinky one. Say, how do you make glazes on oils and acrylics? I understand how they're done in watercolours, but i tried doing them once in acrylics and it didn't work. The dilluted paint just didn't want to be spread over the already painted plasticky surface, I kept pushing the drops from one side to the other. I lost.

Chloe Cumming said...

Welcome back Gabriel!

Acrylics don’t glaze well with just water.

Luckily there are like a gazillion glaze mediums, especially Golden (Golden the brand not the colour) ones. Glaze mediums and gels are more abundantly various for acrylics than any other medium. There are also some that retard drying which opens up other possibilities.

Oil glazes... well I could write a book about that.

Shawn Dickinson said...

Wow! More great Chloe art. I'm so jealous! You're just too talended for your own good. Hhahaha!

I was wondering, how long does it usually take an oil painting to dry? I've been working with oils lately, and they are wet for so long. I've even tried pointing a fan at it all night to help it dry. Any hints?

Anyways, I love everything on this post. It's too hard to pick a favorite this time.

Chloe Cumming said...

Patience Shawn, it takes patience.

Well is also depends on how you apply them, if you apply them super thick they will take ages to dry. But sometimes that can be nice!

I find it kind of hard to articulte oil techniques in words, I've spent so long teaching myself through trial and error... and I'm still learning... there are a lot of resin type mediums you can get, if you mix them with the paint it'll dry quicker. I tend to use combinations of paint, wax, oil, egg, turpentine, then all the various mediums, alkaflow, thixotropic gels, spectragel, wingel, oleopasto, they all have stupid names and they're lots of fun.

Marc Deckter said...

It's fascinating watching these paintings evolve... thanks for sharing your process.

I love the colored pencil John Cena studies! It's interesting to hear your observations regarding how you use each of your tools - colored pencils are used "soft and gentle" - it might be a cool experiment to force yourself to use the colored pencils "hard and rough" - I guess you might break the pencils!

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