A Lighter Shade of Pale

This week I tried something a little different.



Thinking in Pictures 30 X 40 acrylic, ink, oil crayon, graphite, marker and charcoal for Paint Party Friday

I know I usually work in a much more intense palette, but lately I've been drawn to lighter colors, While I was working on the marine life collages for the elementary school, I covered a great big canvas in different papers: maps, handmade papers, letters, a number from a road race I ran a couple of years ago; there's even an unfinished painting underneath there somewhere. Then, I layered on acrylic paint with a large palette knife. I let that dry overnight and took it to school with me to work on at lunch. While I was dry-brushing on some white paint, one of my eleventh grade students, Emily, got interested in what I was doing. (Emily's quite a gifted artist herself, but she prefers to draws dragons. She's got sketchbook after sketchbook filled with gorgeous, intricate dragons rendered in brilliant Prismacolor pencils). I borrowed one of her pencils and began to put the marks and symbols I always put on my abstracts, and, before I knew it, Emily had joined me! So I just let her take over the marking, and I began on the scratching-through-the- layers-of-paint-with-something-sharp-to-let-the layers-show-through-part. We began to see pictures in the layers then, and Emily enhanced some of these with her pencil. Can you see them? There are hearts, a figure of a person, and even a dragon's head. If you look very closely, you might see her name or what Ilike to call her: "M."

This was so much fun that I'm going to take lots more canvases in for us to collaborate on, and maybe someday Emily will even let me post one of drawings here for you. Keep your fingers crossed!