Friday 13 August 2010

A wet afternoon

What a wet afternoon.....my goodness it's like November. I thought East Anglia was supposed to be the driest county in the UK...Hmmm not this week.

I need to prepare some canvases to work on. This takes quite a lot of time as I like to build layers. So to make a start I first gesso the board, whether it's a prepared canvas or just a bit of found wood. The gesso gives a good base for both painting and gluing. Then I layered some torn newspaper, some fab metalic gold tissue, got my big black marker and started to scribble. The marker is not permanent so tends to change colour as I work over it. then mixed up some thin greys and sort of wrote over the whole lot.

These will take a few hours to dry when I will slosh some thinish white emulsion over the top....I think. I like to use house emulsion, sometimes, as it rubs away giving a chalky effect. The effect will be a pale surface but with depth, on which I will do my next Maltese inspired work.

While I had the emulsion out I roughly pianted the boards I will put up around the walls, to make hanging paintings easier. In preparation for the open studios weekends.