Summer Sketchbook Days 18-22

We've had the most horrendously wet summer here, but I did manage to get out when the rain had died down to a drizzle.  I took lots of photos before settling on the white daisies, which have been delighting me over the past few weeks.  Because of our summer weather I decided to work from the photograph.



First of all I tried out the scratching technique with various media as seen below:



Neocolor II Aquarelle washed with water on left hand side, chalk pastel on right hand side.



Neocolor II Aquarelle again on the left hand side.  The top half washed with water.  Oil pastels on the right.

I tried using wet media, watercolour and Koh-i-Noor paints, to capture the main areas of colour in parts of the garden. 

In each case, the print from the wet paint looks better than the original!

When I tried the wax resist, I started by drawing with crayons and oil pastels, painting a water based paint on top, but found the paint coloured the crayon or oil pastels and I couldn't get the white of the flowers.  However, when I tried drawing with a candle it worked beautifully.  Again, I think the print from the original looks better, although the scratch marks of the stems don't show in the print.

I tried the same exercise as Sian did with the sgrafitto, setting them out in an ordered fashion.  

One or two didn't work well, not because of the media, but because of my colour choices, and so I tried them again on the left hand page using different colours.  I used the information I gained to plan my sgrafitto picture.



layer 1





layer 2

finished picture


While working on this technique I remembered a similar technique I learned some years ago and tried it with my white flowers.  I painted the whole page with undiluted dark acrylic paint (I used Hooker's Green) and then worked on top with oil pastels.  The picture can then be scratched into, giving texture and revealing the darker acrylic paint behind the oil pastels.  The results are below:

Above is a picture I did some years ago of part of my garden using the oil pastels over dark acrylic paint and scratching back for texture.