Stormy Abstract

And here's my second effort of the day.  Another with a specially prepared crackle paste surface.  This time, the special guest in the surface was one of those net bags that satsumas come in from the supermarket.  After adding crackle paste and watercolour ground to the board (this time without dividing them up with a straight line), I pushed the netting into the paste at the bottom, being careful to include a stretched bit of netting in the middle at the bottom.  After the paste had dried, I did manage to remove all the netting, although I had to use tweezers to remove some of the tiny strands.  And I went over the bottom of the paper with watercolour ground afterwards, just in case there were any places where there was no longer any paste on the board.

The plan was again to go for an orange cool colour scheme: Indian yellow and cadmium red in the sky and the rest of the painting to be in blues and greens (using Prussian blue, viridian and Indian yellow).  There is also some burnt sienna and a little burnt umber in the bottom of the painting.  First things first, though.  I dug out the waterfall green acrylic ink and tried to use it to colour in all the cracks, whether caused by the paste or the netting.  Then I did the watercolour painting.  And then I tried to paint the netting cracks in titanium white.  That didn't really work, so I tried acrylic inks again.  There's a lot of red earth ink on the upper left, indigo ink on the right and indigo and sepia ink in the netting cracks.  And finally after lots of trial and error, you can see that I discovered that the best way to show up the netting cracks is by using inks after doing the watercolour painting.  I finished off with some titanium white spatters at the top (which don't show up well) and an attempt at colouring in some of the individual islands surrounded by netting cracks (which does seem to have worked).

I'm really happy with this one.  One of the things I like about it is that I still don't know what it is.  I could have added a boat on the horizon and ended up with a painting of stormy seas.  Or I could have added a cabin or a stag and ended up with a painting of a load of rocks left at one at one end of a long ago melted glacier or at the bottom of a volcano.  But I thought I'd leave it ambiguous.  It helps that my weird choice of colours doesn't help - none of these possible interpretations have been coloured "correctly".

Oh, and the crackle pasting and satsuma netting have both really worked out well.  And not having a straight line dividing the board between paste and ground  is a no brainier in future.  This is an experiment that's worth repeating.