Though I am growing to dislike that term (pivot) it is so overused these days. But it is what I did with the Silvertone headstock painting. And I’m going to share with you how that came about.
When I did the sketch out for the Silvertone I was planning on doing an acrylic ink stippling painting on canvas board that I had gessoed to almost smooth. Almost, because the one I made smooth had issues of its own when I started putting dots of acrylic on it. I had the canvas board prepared and set it aside to work on Fred, the fish, and to finish up the trio of tulips.
Working on Fred exposed some issues for me with regards to doing the stippling. It turns out to be a little hard on my eyes and my hands the way I do it. So, while I continue to work on Fred a little at a time, I’m currently not inclined to pursue additional stippling projects. This one will take quite a while to finish.
Over the Easter weekend, I had a lot of time to work on art and one of the pieces I chose to tackle was a set of berries that I had started as an experiment. There were a couple of parts to the experiment, but one part was key to working on the Silvertone. The berries are pastel on canvas board that has been coated in a sanded gesso. I didn’t put much forethought into preparing the canvas board, so it was especially textured. It has the canvas texture with the sanded texture on top of that so a little challenging when trying to get a good consistent coverage. But I persevered and it came out great. I am still super excited about how it turned out.
With the success of the berries, I looked at my prepared canvas board for the Silvertone and wondered if pastel might be a better choice for it. So I gave it a coating of the sanded gesso. The great thing is that the sanded gesso I have is clear, so it didn’t obscure the sketch that I had already done. Once it dried, I laid it on the art table as the next piece to start. This was the last night of the long weekend for me so I wasn’t really planning on starting anything. Except. Yeah, you got it. That “Except” word. With it laying on the table I thought ‘I wonder how that’s going to work.’
That was in reference to the background I knew I wanted to create. I wanted to use the browns, oranges, and yellows like a tortoiseshell style guitar pick. Or something more reminiscent of that. So I tried a bit of that to see if it was going to be as I hoped. And it was. But then I was faced with another challenge or puzzle. The logo.
How was I going to handle the detail of the logo and get the black where it needed to be and keep a reasonably crisp line to the word? Especially given that the pastels I use don’t have a fine point to them. I started experimenting and landed on a method that was working quite well. I used a pastel pencil to mark in the brand name or logo and then a stump to even it out and sort of force the pastel into the surface so it would hopefully hold. Then for the black around it I took a different stump (smudging stick) and instead of using the pastel on the surface I rubbed the stump across the pastel to pick up the color and then used the stump to paint on the surface in between the letters and in the voids of the letters. It worked. And I thought I’d leave it there and go eat. I didn’t stay away of course.
After dinner I had to return to the Silvertone and see how it was really going to look with this technique of painting with the stump. So I worked on it a while longer. The thing about using the stump to paint the pastel on the canvasboard is that it works quite well if you have a good even or thorough coating of the sanded gesso. If you have gaps, it’s not very effective. And in fact, if you have an acrylic gesso underlay with no texture and a not so thorough coating of texture then the pastel isn’t going to stick well no matter what you do. I found out the hard way.
The stump painting thing was working, and it had gotten late enough that I had to go to bed because I had day job the next day. You would think this would mean it would be a while before I got back to working on the piece. Well, not when every time you walk past it you feel compelled to do a little more and a little more. Because as it turned out the stump painting process also worked well in between strings and tuning pegs. Which means quite a lot got done in five-minute increments randomly throughout the day. I also took some time at lunch to work on it.
That the Silvertone piece was being that compelling to work on was on the one hand really cool. I do enjoy pieces like that. They often come together fairly quickly and with some ease. On the other hand, they can be detrimental to things like sleep and getting much else done. I had Taekwondo class that evening so I worked on it a little before class and then, since I’d been up late the night before I thought I’d go to bed early. Except. I stopped in the studio a moment to try something and forgot to stop so I was late getting to bed again.
I had some minor frustrations along the way. One was finding that I didn’t have a really good sand coat on the surface, so some areas had trouble taking the pastel. Another was my fix for that. Which may or may not be very sound. Since my gesso is clear, I thought I’d just add another coat. I made a point of spray fixing the pastel first but that wasn’t as helpful as I had hoped. I probably would have been better to give it a finish fix. It wasn’t helpful because, some of the pastels I work with are liquid soluble, so things smeared pretty good as I painted the gesso over it. I nearly destroyed it about halfway through working on it. Fortunately, I was able to work with the mess I made and use it somewhat to my ultimate advantage. Yes, I was worried for a moment.
And even after that, it did not become any less compelling. It demanded attention and got it because for me it was so exciting to see it come together. And at the point I dusted it the first time with the ‘glitter’ I was so excited I wanted to burst. That ‘glitter’ was another part that was a ‘how am I going to do this’. And to figure it out and see it work was awesome. Though, the spray fix did destroy it a couple of time because it is a dusting, and the pastel is liquid soluble and spay fix is a liquid. It took a couple of passes to get it to stay enough to be visible and look purposeful.
I learned a lot doing this painting and the berries, but I made bigger mistakes and adjustments on this than the berries. It has also, well both paintings, have inspired me to do more pastel work. So much so that even finished the big experiment that I started last year. And, I have several more pieces lined up that I will be doing in pastel.
For those who might be curious as to what I used to create the Silverton painting, I used a variety of soft pastels and pastel pencils. I used soft pastels from Sennelier and Rembrandt and pastel pencils from Conte and Derwent. And I used a little bit of Conte pastel crayons for the white and black. I used your regular run of the mill paper stumps and tortillons for painting on the surface in the tight areas as well as for smudging and blending the pastel. I did a lot of that with my fingers as well. My surface is a 12 inch by 16 inch canvas board that was pre-primed and then I added a couple more layers of gesso to smooth most of the canvas texture out. One layer was tinted. Then after I sketched in the basics for the headstock I added a layer, not enough of one, of Art Spectrum Colorfix Original.
And that’s how the Silvertone became a pastel painting instead of the stippling painting as originally planned.
And now to get started on the next thing.
Cheers!