Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Butterflies reprised



Well, the butterflies intrigued me enough that I thought I would try them again, and this time I took some process photographs.

The new version of the painting is much larger -- nearly 24 inches across versus 14 inches for the original.

I first wet down the sheet and then dropped color into the areas of the butterflies. I also decided to go a little wild with some of the colors, so I have some blue, green and pink butterflies among the yellow ones.

After those soft color blossoms dried, I spent hours carefully masking the butterflies. I used some tape in larger areas, and carefully sealed those edges with masking fluid. Then the masking fluid went around the taped areas and into all the nooks and crannies that make up the butterfly shapes. I didn't photograph the masking stage...my masking fluid is colorless, so there wasn't much to see.


This image shows my next step -- painting over the entire painting with dark colors, and then crumpling sheets of plastic wrap into the wet paint. In the first version of the painting, I carefully painted all the textured effects. For this one, I wanted to try the random texturizing that plastic wrap could provide. The wet pools of color also tended to intensify pure pigments, so some colorful patches -- ranging from dark purple, to green to blue -- were created along with the texture.

I let the plastic wrap stay on the wet surface for about an hour. Then I carefully peeled the plastic off so the entire surface could completely dry.

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