Have A Spare
The burned out light bulb. As an image it says a lot.
Today has been a two steps back day for this painting. Although not a total failure, but certainly enough to want to set fire to something.
Let’s start with the paper. Oh, my lovely Strathmore 500 why have your forsaken me. After making final minor adjustments to the drawing adding details and such, I taped it to the board, and made ready for the first washes. I like to wash the whole paper with tone so that from the start there is something holding it all together. I knew something was up when, after having applied the initial clean water wash that helps the drawing to set into the paper, there appeared little pimples all over the board. This hasn’t ever happened before. I thought “maybe I’ve just put too much water on the board, I’ll wait for it to dry out.” I used a hair dryer some, and set about preparing my paints. The pimples didn’t go away. I applied the first wash and sure enough, damn pimples. The pigment soaked into those parts and looked really bad. I thought I was done with pimples when I was done with adolescence, guess not.
I will spare you the details of the printing issues that I ran into, as I really don’t understand them myself. Suffice to say that I finally made the call to pull the painting off the board to salvage the printout underneath it. I cannot explain this unusual reaction. I carefully reviewed other pieces that were created from the same piece of board. The only thing I can think of is that I may have used the back of the board. If that’s the case, I’ll make some other painting on the other side later. But for now, luckily, I had a full sheet of Arches Hot Press 300# under the desk.
The show must go on.
Having redrawn the image on to the Arches, I returned to my desk to find that the Chromalux bulb that I use in my desk lamp was blown out. Hurmf! Luckily, I had a spare bulb on my shelf.
Today’s lesson kids, “have a spare.”
PS: there are a whopping 8 posts that chronicle the creation of this piece, to see the next moves check out Post #5: Troll Process; First Moves
to see the previous post about this image go to Post #3: All Trolls on Board!
Upon further investigation, there is a correct side to paint on. Silly me. Now, I’ll redraw this painting again (3rd time) onto another piece of Strathmore 500. Yes, I had a spare of that too. However the 2nd light bulb blew out, and I don’t have anymore Chromalux bulbs. I may be looking into a new desk lamp here in the near future.