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Author: Nicholas_Simmons, Contributing Editor
 | I will go back to the darks again - not just to make them darker, but to soften a bunch of hard edges. It's far enough along now where I see things I know I have to do, but there's still lots of white paper to cover, so those areas screaming out for attention will wait. Getting into something more detailed is dangerous here - I'd rather do that down the road, when I have a better sense of what the painting is (or isn't) asking for. I will not keep painting just because the brush is loaded. Which reminds me of the great Mark Twain line: "To the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." |
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I finished the first round of darks, and went back to them. Some interesting things happened with the paint the first time, so I have to decide how much of it I want to cover; that age-old artist's dilemma of whether or not to sacrifice something good in the interests of the overall composition. All of the patterns and textures are nice, but make the painting busier than I like. There is already plenty going on with the flowers, so I want the large dark areas to be simple and dramatic. I need to unify those areas, so I dampen the paper and go back in, starting with the darkest parts of the previous layer, making it look as natural as I can. I try to preserve some of the nicer things that happened in the first layer, but most of them will be obscured, visible only at close range. |  |
| At the same time, I soften many of the hard edges, wet in wet. The toughest thing there is having the paper just the right dampness. I don't soften every bit of every hard edge, but enough to create the impression. Later on, I'll add some washes that will further integrate the darks with the rest of the painting.
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