Monday 17 August 2009

The Viola Adventure

Who would have thought that this innocuous little flower could cause me so much grief? I have agreed to do a little step-by-step demonstration for the UKCPS stand at the forthcoming Art Materials Live event in Birmingham. The task has turned out to be far less straightforward than I envisaged.

Here are four of my five attempts to recreate a Viola (or Violas) for this task. One is on Fabriano 5 paper and the other three are on ordinary sandpaper (Fine Grit 600) from a local DIY shop and they were all abysmal failures!


The sandpaper was going to give me a nice, brightly coloured, easily rendered and interesting picture. What was I thinking?! What do you generally do when your first attempt fails? You try again of course, learning from your mistakes and doing it differently. You do not, however, do it three times in almost exactly the same way, expecting somehow that some miracle is going to happen whereby a skilfully rendered, beautiful flower will emerge.

There are probably folks out there who can work wonders with pencils and bog standard sandpaper - if they can avoid choking on the pencil dust, that is - unfortunately, they do not include yours truly! And the other failure on Fabriano 5? Well, the colours were all wrong and the background was.....well.......enough said.


Anyway, here is the Viola picture I am actually doing for this task. It's the one I started doing in the first place, before I decided I could do it much better on other papers. It's really not that bad - Oh, the irony!! This image represents step three of the exercise and I am planning to have it finished by either step four or five.



And finally....... here's a picture of a natty little wooden pencil holder which someone at my art group was kind enough to make for me. It holds 13 pencils, even the stumpy ones, which is about right for the number I generally use for a single picture. Thanks John!

4 comments:

Pauline said...

You sound as though you are on the right track with this one, but I think the others were pretty good too, I especially liked the ones bottom right.

Paula Pertile said...

Well the 'others' don't look so bad to me (or bad at all), but who am I. I think the 'winner' is lovely. How frustrating that you had to go through all of that torture!

Like the pencil holder. I could use something like that for just a few.

Gillian Mowbray said...

I don't understand what was worrying you - they all look great. I'd have given up after the first attempt - full marks for persistance. I think the choice of support is one of the most tricky things with CP work. I do wish we could get Pastelbord here!

Janet said...

Thanks everyone, I do appreciate your support. I agree with you about getting Pastelbord here, Gillian - it's so expensive to have it shipped from the US.

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