How mixed? I don't hear you ask. But I'll answer anyway. I started with paper. Then I added: Pencil; water-soluble ink; non-water-soluble ink; watercolours; oil paints; shiny metallic oil paints; turpentine; water; digital editing. This is pretty much my ideal process - I will always try to cram more media into any given picture. The incompatible media result in some very interesting textures and bold colour combinations without muddiness.
The drawing is awful, though. It started out as a longish rectangular picture, but the right hand side was just so bad that I cut it off. There is still some horrendousness around the horizon line on the right hand edge, but I couldn't get rid of that and still have a picture.
I'll just pass it off as a cautionary tale. Listen here, children: having two lines (here, the grass and the mountain) arbitrarily touch instead of either crossing or having a gap in between them is just as bad as, in fiction, having an arbitrary coincidence with neither plot significance nor relevance to the theme. If your writing is all about the randomness of life, for instance, you might have a pass, and likewise under some conditions it would be okay to break this line rule.
Of course, both incontrovertibly happen the whole time in real life, but are still unacceptable in art. Reality is unrealistic. Seriously though, we do it all the time without noticing, and it's one of those things that can make an otherwise fine picture look unaccountably icky. (Until you notice it, of course, then it looks accountably icky.) Oh no, now everyone who reads this will only look at the mistake. And don't even ask me what that pink thing in the sky is. It's art, OK?
The wonderful thing about playing with mixed media is that, like life, you learn things artistically that you may not have learned in school. Enjoy!
ReplyDeleteThe great thing about 'failures' is that it's one more thing you can cross off your list because you now know it doesn't work. ;)
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