Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Daydreams


Silverpoint
11 x 8

After those last two let's cleanse the room with something a bit better. Not much to say about this. I'm thinking about cropping a little bit off the top, but that will wait until framing time, assuming I frame it at all. All for today, not feeling very talkative. I just wanted to put something half way decent up for you to see.

Changed my mind, I do have something to say here. This is actually a second version. The first wasn't that bad with one exception. I wasn't all that satisfied with the face. Considering that's the center of interest, that's really not such a small problem. But it just needed a little change so maybe I could fix it. I've said that erasing is iffy at best with silverpoint. In this case iffy turned out to be no way, won't come off. Well, it is a gouache ground so maybe I could just reground it, gouache is opaque right? Yeah, not so much here, and the toned ground proved to be impossible to match. One last try, sandpaper. Sand off that spot and do here again. Yeah good idea. This is a second version for a reason. Things just went from bad to worse to the point that the only way to save it was to start from scratch, totally new version. Should have done that to start with. The moral is with silverpoint, just don't screw up. Know what you're going to do and do it right.

2 comments:

d00mg1rl said...

I'd never heard of Silverpoint so I went and looked it up. I guess these images are much better in real life? They come across as faded my end.

Dave B said...

Maybe or maybe you're just used to seeing highly retouched photos that have the darks pushed to the limit. Let's say I took the darks down to pure or nearly pure black. What happens? All the light, airy feel that I want becomes heavy and it's a completely different picture. At one time I was like that too thinking if I going to make a mistake err on the side of power. As a result I had a lot of dark, heavy, almost baroque work that really said nothing other than look at how heavy a hand I have, and I really don't understand how light bounces around in shadows.