pbundy on DeviantArthttps://www.deviantart.com/pbundy/art/Lost-at-Sea-80394389pbundy

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Lost at Sea

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Description

If only I had some progressive shots of this piece, you'd really be able to tell how much work was put into this. We'll start the description by counting how many layers of paint there are on here.

1. Base layer of a cadmium red medium hue.
2. A quote from a song I was listening to, written with a cadmium yellow medium hue.
3. Covered the whole thing in ivory black after the last step.

This was thought up from a dining set I saw that looked really cool. You could see these hints of what would make you think the table was originally red from where the table had taken some wear-and-tare. So after this step I took some sandpaper to the whole thing to try to get the same effect. Didn't work. I had hoped you'd get the hint of this gold text underneath after I had sanded some layers down, this didn't happen either. Actually the yellow paint was oddly the only thing really coming off with the sanding.

4. Went back over it in red.
5. Then again in black to try a second time for the same look.

Sanded some more, still, could plainly see the words and didn't look at all like what I wanted.

6. Painted in between the words with ultramarine blue because I was kind of feeling this patriotic color scheme going on.
7. Painted again black.

Sanded some more. By this point the picture looked like an overly abused brick wall layered with graffiti. The instructor decided to give me a hand and try to show me some techniques.

8. He gave me some permanent green light and told me to cover the whole thing with that.
9. Then we went over it again with a pyrrole red light.

We let that sit for about 20 minutes, and then sprinkled some water on it to break away spots of the red paint. Once those had set in a little, with a rag, we dabbed them up to reveal the green underneath. This looked really good and I was content with all the trouble I had gone through, and what we had done in about half an hour.

Are you kind of getting a hint where this is going? So far the background alone has at least, if I remembered them all correctly, 9 layers. That's not ever starting with the hand.

10. I wanted to try to represent the colors in a hand without trying to mix a skin colored tone. So the hand started with titanium white.
11. Then a layer of cadmium yellow light hue.
12. Third for the hand was a light layer of the cadmium red.

From here I could see this wasn't really going to work how I wanted. So I mixed a skin or peach colored tone and a gradient of that with about 5 different shades. So keeping count, we'll say 13 through 17, because I can only count 4 colors on the hand now, are on just the hand.

Thinking the negative space was a little bland, layer number 18 was some thin cadmium yellow lines coming from the hand as if expressing some super human/angelic powers. Didn't like this at all and tried to clean it up but it had already dried.

19-25 were all spent trying to correct the background. A layer of green, a layer of pyrrole red, which was the wrong red so I had to go buy a bottle of the pyrrole red light. Start again with another layer of green, then another red but the piece had been worked so much that the rest of the background, except for where I was trying to fix where I had put the yellow, was all worn out so I realized I had to do the whole background to fix it. So finished the background with one last layer of green, then another red. After it dried, did some visible sanding and washing which left it where it is now.

I'm hoping to get on deviantART's Guinness book for the longest description, and I'm trying to be as brief as possible.

So, to finish up, layers 26-29 would have been going over the whole hand again with a mix of cadmium red, yellow ochre and white (to make my skin tone) because so much green and red had smeared over it and so much of the hand had been wiped and washed off that I had to re-do the whole thing.

29 layers of paint! By looking at it you see only a hand full (get it, a hand full?) of colors, but I really liked this piece because there is so much more underneath that. I've thought about going over it with a ultramarine blue glaze, maybe painting in some bubbles to make it look as though a hand is reaching up from the depths of some mass of water for help, but if I decide to do so, I will make it a totally separate deviation.

2008.03.13
Image size
480x640px 114.2 KB
Make
Canon
Model
Canon PowerShot A560
Shutter Speed
1/20 second
Aperture
F/2.6
Focal Length
6 mm
ISO Speed
320
Date Taken
Mar 18, 2008, 9:17:57 AM
© 2008 - 2024 pbundy
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