Lines Coloring Variations

Day 3 Line and color by Meera Rao

Day 3 of Myrna Wacknov's workshop 'Variations' focused on line and texture as line.  She did a demo of texturizing paper by gesso-ing not up-to par painting : gesso alone, gesso on stencil, gesso a with  roller, smoothing out with credit card, stamping on gesso, laying wax paper, plastic wrap etc for texture.  She explained that when the gesso is dry, she makes her drawing on the textured paper with any of the various tools - droppers with ink, sticks, clay tool, wide markers, tree sticks, bamboo pens and anything else that will make a line :) 

The limitations and constraints from roll of dice on day 3 gave me split complement colors Red/yellowgreen/bluegreen and color as the second design element with line as the  dominant feature. 

An accidental discovery on my part as to how color from my old painting that I was covering up with gesso showed up when I tried to use a stencil on too thin, too wet gesso led me to use a wooden coffee stick to gouge out the still wet gesso to sketch freehand my drawing -- I am very pleased how drawing like that satisfied the requirements of line, color and texture. I used a delicate/fine stamp on the bandana area. The painting I had chosen to gesso over by chance had the colors I had rolled and I loved how they showed through.  I did minimal painting with yellow green, blue green on the background and red on the bandana. I used Blue and red also for value and that intensified the color showing thru. Gesso also enabled me to wipe off paint when I did not like my choices.  It was uncanny how colors from the old waterscape painting underneath worked for  this particular portrait variation! 

closeup of line, color and texture 

The whole process was so much fun that I had to force myself to stop :)  I continued the fun by texturing two or three more papers and can't wait to paint on them. I also loved how Myrna used red gesso in one of her demos to sketch her drawing. Sketching the variations and plotting the values numerous times definitely made me familiar with the subject and gave me easy spontaneity when it came to painting.