Sunday, April 19, 2009

"WHEN LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS..."

When life gives you lemons...do the best you can with them. There I was, patiently painting my background, just about to demonstrate an interesting technique to give a grassy appearance when disaster happened.

Before we talk about the tragedy, let me show you my idea for creating a grassy effect. Up until the Aquamarine layer I was gently rubbing the pigment with a cotton square dipped in OMS, using circular motions. When I applied the Parrot Green layer, instead of rubbing it, I patted gently which create the mottled effect you see below. Here's what it looked like:



So far, so good. Now I started the Dahlia Purple layer and disaster strikes. A big blob of OMS fell on the painting and no matter how much I tried I couldn't fix it with colored pencils alone.

And so we go back to when life gives you lemons. I wasn't about to start over, so I grabbed my box of oil pastels, my embossing heat tool and tons of make-up cotton squares as well as Q-tips.

This is how I proceeded to fix the mess. First I heated the surface, one small area at a time, with my Embossing Heat Tool. Immediately after heating the paper, I applied some very dark green Holbein oil pastel (no idea what the name of the color is) and while the oil pastel was still soft and maleable, I quickly rubbed the surface aggresively with a cotton square wrapped around my finger . I repeated the procedure several times till I fixed the whole BG, switching the greens, I'd just grabbed the first dark ones I saw in the box, no time to get choosy. In the tight areas surrounding Deirdre's edges, I used a Q-tip. Here's what it looks like after the surgery:



The cream color you see around her is a small patch of Jasmine to see if it was going to cover the green spills. But now I lost the beautiful highlight around her. Still have to figure that one out. Oh, well, crossing fingers hope it works, maybe I'll try the diluted gouache technique to cover up the yellowed color around her.

I'm leaving the BG alone for the time being. Meanwhile, I'll start my favorite part - the eyes!

Many hugs,
Jade

2 comments:

Kathleen said...

Great save! Looking forward to seeing the finished product. I bet that gouache would work, too...
Kathy

Anonymous said...

You are a great surgeon!!!!!

Good luck -

Bev

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