The Contingent Stones

[corvi]

I did not do any homework for brush-painting class this week, as I was frantically trying to finish a papercut for the Fall Fair instead.

Every painting in the Mountain Style (the style I am studying) features rocks. So it's important to be able to make a lot of different kinds of rocks - jagged rocks, swirly wind-carved rocks, slippery moss rocks - so you're not just putting the Same Three Rocks into every painting. 

The instructor was still in a rock-teaching mood, but took the exact opposite approach this week. Instead of teaching the formal artistic conventions around creating rocks - brush strokes layout - she had us make random ink marks on the paper. Then she had us look at our ink marks and try to see in them the planes and facets of stones, as an exercise in understanding rocks as 3-dimensional objects. Then we were to add ink to highlight and bring forward the rocks that were already there on the page.

First we smeared ink on waterproof sheets of plastic, where it beaded into dots, then pressed the plastic against our paper to make bunches of random dots.

I was late and missed the beginning of the demonstration, but here is the instructor's rough, randomly-generated rock, with bamboo in front of it:


Here are the dots I got out by painting ink onto the plastic sheet and stamping it on my page:

I don't think I really saw the dots as rocks, per se, but I did see where they seemed to cluster into curves, and painting along those curves got me some intriguing looking rocks. (The page has been rotated)



I look at this and I don't really see a drawing of three dimensional rocks rendered in two dimensions (what the heck is happening about a quarter of the way over from the left side? It doesn't match any shape I can come up with) but it does have a really rough natural look. Much less tidy than my usual rock paintings. It looks like rugged and difficult going. A sea cliff or forbidden mountain. Kind of cool!

Then she had is repeat the exercise, but instead of applying random dots with plastic sheeting, we crumpled up a piece of paper painted it, and used that to stamp random ink onto the paper. The crumpled inky folds resulted in lots of random straight lines and triangles. Then you'd look at those pre-existing lines and shade them to get faceted rocks. Here's what it looked like when she did it:




I found "shade pre-existing shapes" a much harder exercise than "connect dots to make shapes". Here are my randomly generated lines:



Attempts at shading them didn't produce anything that really resembles rocks:


I am not yet very good at improvisational painting and going with the flow, but it's fun!

(Spoiler: she does more improvisational painting next week. I remain not-good-at-it.)

Comments

[twoeleven]

The last picture is rocks, sorta. You have a scale error: it's glacial terrain, seen from above, with thin, jagged ridges sticking up between the glaciers, and sunlight from the right side of the image.

There's a hell of a cliff on the left side of the picture, too.

[juli]

I totally see that, and the opposite: a jagged slot canyon thingo seen looking through it. But it's easy to see the little splotch shaped like a toucan at the bottom as a person seen from above, walking defiantly forward as they approach the narrow path.

[twoeleven]

Oooh! That took me a minute, but yes, you're right!

The little toucan-person is a dead give-away it's seen from above. I don't quite know why, since it's not a common view of a person, but there it is. The human mind is a wonderful thing to waste recognize patterns where there are none. :)

[shadaras]

That's a cool exercise! It seems hard, but in a fun way.

[ivy]

Wow, the "when she did it" with the crumpled paper is really good! Aspirationally inspiring (even though I don't even paint at all, heh.)