Sunday 10 March 2013

Watching paint dry....

I suppose we all do it, and this one has definitely been one of those :)
A friend sent me a text earlier and asked me if I'd created anything, to which the answer was
"it's an abstract industrial thing, sort of rusty looking".
Well, what else would you call it?

This started off with a bit of reminiscing about things that were invaluable but that
(as a civvie) can no longer be obtained by simply walking into the G10 stores,
such as black nasty*, brown shiny** and green hairy***.
Another blast from the past is Red Death, aka Red Lead or Lead Oxide Primer, which,
as the name suggests was a bit dodgy and is now probably a banned substance!
Anyway, the discussion brought back a guy with a car that had various rust spots,
so he covered them with black nasty and red lead,
but got carried away and painted the whole car!
Now, as it happens, Adirondack's Terra Cotta acrylic is the perfect shade for Red Lead,
so I decided to have a go at another abstract piece. 
I had no idea where this was going, it was a case of apply a layer of something,
wait for it to dry, then do something else.
The layers include:
Terra Cotta acrylic,
patches of other acrylic,
diluted acrylic ink,
embossing paste,
more acrylic ink,
poster paint,
and quite a bit of water.
The site glass is a few drops of ink sandwiched between microscope slides,
and a layer of paint behind it.
The 'toxic leak' is diluted gold acrylic.

* Black Nasty is tape. A bit like duct tape, but black and probably more versatile!
**Brown Shiny is also tape, but it's brown and shiny, instead of black and nasty.
***Green Hairy isn't tape, it's string. I bet you can't guess what it looks like ;)

Sunday 3 March 2013

75

This was a piece that came from out of the blue,
and it hasn't had hours of agonising and planning.


On Thursday I put the van in for its MOT, so had to walk the last mile to work.
I stuck my earphones in and wandered along without any real cares,
just enjoying the first signs of spring appearing.


The music playing, at random, was OMD-"Architecture & Morality",
and somewhere at the back of my mind the seeds of this took root;
no real plan, just the idea of doing something sort of industrial and grungy. 
The canvas already had a drab background on it from a previous piece that was recycled
(steampunk moth, which I was never 100% happy with),
so it was just a case of adding some detail.
I chose 75 as OMD was the abbreviation for engine oils when I was serving,
and 75 was the most common one.
Simple things, as they say.