Contingent Stones 2: made by accident
Oct. 16th, 2019 07:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
corvi(Previous lesson: Contingent stones 1)
We did another contingent stones lesson: crumpling paper, painting ink along the resulting ridges and hollows, and then using that to stamp unpredictable lines on the page, which we then attempted to develop into jagged stones, cliffs, and mountains. I remain terrible at it.
When the instructor does it, it looks like this:
I had less awesome results. This one looks like the blocky, layered mountains in an Orthodox religious icon, but not, uh, exactly in a good way:
This one is weirdly literal, it just looks like ... crumpled paper:
What is even going on this one? Standing on the inside of a giant robot's elbow, looking up into the armpit, and the distant mechanical chin beyond, I guess:
Looking at these, I noticed that I was really only managing two layers of shading - light or pale shadow. So at home, I worked on trying to finish a piece and keep adding shadow until it was something like "done".Unfortunately, the vague and unfinished nature of previous attempts was hiding exactly how incoherent my grasp of the geometry is. Hehe, whoops.
The instructor looked at the art and said she thought I was getting too attached to the ink on the page and taking them too seriously, to the detriment of the rock that they were gesturing towards.
She did actually have some concrete suggestions for dealing with that philosophical dilemma (inking a rock, but .. paying less attention to the ink on the page? somehow?), specific ways I should consider deviating from the crumpled-paper-laid ink when relevant: 1) adding cracks and splits to large or complexly shaped polygons, 2) shading at an angle to the lines, not along them, 3) seeing the larger dark areas left by the crumpled paper as surface texture of the rock, and not as shadows to be worked darker. It seemed like useful advice.
For homework, she assigned me a non-random waterfall. I appreciate the break! Next week: still rocks, but a different technique.
I have to share this relevant painting seal carved by Henry Li, which I found trying to figure out where to buy mineral pigments. It apparently says "made by accident," which delights me, and I kind of want to get one and mark all my paintings it applies to, which is almost all of them.
Made by accident!
We did another contingent stones lesson: crumpling paper, painting ink along the resulting ridges and hollows, and then using that to stamp unpredictable lines on the page, which we then attempted to develop into jagged stones, cliffs, and mountains. I remain terrible at it.
When the instructor does it, it looks like this:
I had less awesome results. This one looks like the blocky, layered mountains in an Orthodox religious icon, but not, uh, exactly in a good way:
This one is weirdly literal, it just looks like ... crumpled paper:
What is even going on this one? Standing on the inside of a giant robot's elbow, looking up into the armpit, and the distant mechanical chin beyond, I guess:
Looking at these, I noticed that I was really only managing two layers of shading - light or pale shadow. So at home, I worked on trying to finish a piece and keep adding shadow until it was something like "done".Unfortunately, the vague and unfinished nature of previous attempts was hiding exactly how incoherent my grasp of the geometry is. Hehe, whoops.
The instructor looked at the art and said she thought I was getting too attached to the ink on the page and taking them too seriously, to the detriment of the rock that they were gesturing towards.
She did actually have some concrete suggestions for dealing with that philosophical dilemma (inking a rock, but .. paying less attention to the ink on the page? somehow?), specific ways I should consider deviating from the crumpled-paper-laid ink when relevant: 1) adding cracks and splits to large or complexly shaped polygons, 2) shading at an angle to the lines, not along them, 3) seeing the larger dark areas left by the crumpled paper as surface texture of the rock, and not as shadows to be worked darker. It seemed like useful advice.
For homework, she assigned me a non-random waterfall. I appreciate the break! Next week: still rocks, but a different technique.
I have to share this relevant painting seal carved by Henry Li, which I found trying to figure out where to buy mineral pigments. It apparently says "made by accident," which delights me, and I kind of want to get one and mark all my paintings it applies to, which is almost all of them.
Made by accident!
no subject
Date: 2019-10-17 06:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-18 06:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-19 12:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-10-19 01:04 am (UTC)I mean, that's an amazing image, if nothing else!
The second one kind of looks like a face to me, too, with eyes closed in contemplation.