 |
| "Building the Medicine Wheel" 16x20 Oil (Learn about medicine wheels here) |
I'll try anything once.
A long time ago, I started a 16x20 panel for a plein air event. I got as far as blocking in color—ending up with something that looked a bit like a tie-dyed t-shirt—and then the light changed. I never did finish the painting. It ended up in the studio, buried under a stack of fresh panels.
The other week, I came across it again. The vivid color struck me as something that would make a great underpainting for a particular scene I had in mind. I wanted to make a painting of our side yard, where Trina was building a medicine wheel. Because the sun at this time of year in New Mexico can be quite intense, I planned to paint it from my porch, which fell into shade around noon. I wanted to be comfortable. But noontime sun, of course, tends to bleach out color. However, I figured that the brilliant color underlying the bleached-out noontime color would give “sparkle.”
And that did work. But it took some unexpected effort.
When I first set the panel up on the easel, I immediately found the field of hallucinogenic color daunting. How could I get any kind of underdrawing to stand out against it? The scene was a complicated one and included some architecture. I wanted the drawing to be accurate.
In my studio is an old coffee cup stuffed with Sharpie markers of different sizes and colors. A black Sharpie would be perfect! I pulled out the biggest and boldest of the black markers and drew in a fine composition.
I next spent a couple of hours blocking in the painting. The bleached-out colors looked really good against the dropped-acid rainbow.
The next morning, I looked at the painting in horror. Every inch of line I had made with the Sharpie showed through. It was as if the paint I'd applied had gone completely transparent.
 |
| Preliminary Color You can see the Sharpie lines! |
 |
| Close-up showing the Sharpie lines |
My palette does include some transparent colors—Sap Green, Ultramarine Blue—and a few semi-transparent ones, such as Hansa Yellow. But I'd mixed in a considerable amount of opaque white (Titanium-Zinc White) and opaque Yellow Ochre. (It's hard to get bleached-out color without these.) Was the Sharpie bleeding through? Or was the paint just more transparent than I had thought?
A quick Internet search showed that some painters had had the same experience. A few, however, had no problems.
Over the next several days, I stood on my shaded porch and brushed color over the lines. First, thinly, as I usually do, but only to discover next morning that the Sharpie still showed through. I gradually put on thicker and thicker paint. Finally, I gave up on the brush and picked up a knife, applying gobs of paint. After five or six afternoons, I finally managed to cover all the black lines. (Or at least the most annoying ones.)
I'm very happy with the painting. Some of the Sharpie shows through here and there, but it adds to the painting rather than detracting from it. Fortunately, the painting is a private one, not to be sold and only for our home. But I won't use a Sharpie again.
