orangy rock collage
May 13: (one-a-day project)
Today I expanded on my studies of rocks. I was envisioning these rocks painted in an arrangement of squares, each square about 10”x10”, each exploring a different texture/media; a perfect test for my multimedia painting class coming up. Somehow I would attach them to one another so that they stay squared off. But even though one of the purposes of this one-a-day project is to get me off the computer and into ‘studio-mode’, my first thought was that I could just use the photos that I took earlier in the week and make a collage out of them in Photoshop (see above). This didn’t work for some reason so I ended up doing a sketch of what was in my head, and found a couple of reasons why it wasn’t working. In my sketch the rocks echoed each other in some way; it reminded me of putting in stepping stones, each one has to somehow fit into the one before it and the one after it, as a kind of linear puzzle.
There was also a positive/negative interaction that became more apparent when I added watercolour to the sketch. Like the acrylics, the watercolours hadn’t been opened in years, and while I only got about six of them open they just happened to be the colours I wanted. On the bottom sketch I saw that if I had a black and white stone then I would need an orangey background, and with the orangey stones I would need a blackish background to create the positive/negative interaction that I wanted.
sketch of panels of orangy stone images
Previous stone study: https://blogs.ubc.ca/albatz/2011/05/10/stone-study/)