Okay, So I Need an Intervention

Phyllis from my Ruth McDowell class just checked my blog trying to find my pelican and she suggested that an intervention was in order! Hard to find the pelican amongst all the marbling! Of course I was at it again today but I am slowing down a bit. At this point I am trying to trash the size but it just keeps working along no matter what I do to it. It was a much more random day today than yesterday. Working with the same colors for any amount of time is just plain boring!

My order went into Dick Blick last night after moving a bunch of "would be nice to have's" out as even I don't want to spend that much on paints! Having gone to the Art Store Saturday and getting some paints to tide me over showed how very expensive they are for the Golden paints. I did get some alum there and they again have methocel although twice as much as Pro Chem's price.

When working with paints, I quickly revert back to the palette of my childhood when I was taking art lessons -- primaries plus raw umber and burnt sienna and some white and black.

I did buy some of the Dyna Flow paints that Sarah uses and they are nice and fast and I now see why she gets her nice feathering as they do that when used with some of the slower colors. I think if I was using a smaller tray I would be able to encourage longer tendrils of color. Definitely forget those admonishments to only use one brand of paint when marbling!! Mix and match is definitely the way to go!

A dip into some fall colors today inspired by my neighbor's pictures from his trip last week. I love the fall colors where you get all the brilliant warm colors with a bright blue sky and the evergreens.

The more standard green marble.

More of the same but I can never have enough greens.

As part of my transition back to normality from the frenzied fabric marbling of the past week, I am going to TRY tomorrow to just do a couple using only ONE color but with different values. I finally just threw out my old size (three days old) as I have discovered that so much pigment gets into the size that eventually you get an overall staining of the predominant really muddy color. That is why some of my pieces are a little duller than I would like so I think I will change the size maybe every other day unless I trash it earlier. I haven't used but a few drops of surfactant this whole last week.

I will finish off the fabric I have alum-ed and then will start working on some pieces to use this fabric. I think that Photoshop will be an excellent tool to design some relatively simple pieces with the marbled fabric. I might try importing some of the fabric into EQ6 as well and try that. Lots of possibilities!