Sometimes the process is more important than the results.

I was down to my last sheet of paper on my watercolor block. For those of you who have never used watercolor blocks before, they are really useful. All four sides of a pad of paper are attached to the ones below it, except for one place where one can insert a letter opener to peel off the top sheet, when one has just finished painting on it. That all sides are firmly attached means that the paper will not buckle. If it does, one merely has to wait until it dries and the surface becomes flat again. I must have used a lot of water on the previous sheets because this last sheet was a bit warped. It pulled away from the thick cardboard backing sheet.

Today’s watercolor experiment:

Inspiration

I started today’s painting with two ideas in mind: 1) to use gamboge, a yellow color that looks great on my good paper; 2) to manipulate my 2″ flat brush by twisting it as I paint, to get a triangular or ribbon form.  My first brushstroke was the horizontal triangle. It is more wavy than I planned. I can’t blame this on the paper, it was my unsteady hand. The second gamboge stroke came out a little better. I got a nice arc as I twisted the brush. Note that neither of these strokes made it through unscathed in the final sketch.

What to do next? I had a bit of an arc hangover, from my last painting. So, I braced myself with a bit of the hair of the dog and I drew an arc. I interrupted the indanthrone blue arc for the horizontal yellow, triangular stroke. I drew another blue line parallel the arc of the second yellow brushstroke.

Thought Dominoes

I had to think a while before I knew what to do next. The right-most arc reminded me of the beginning part of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, a TV show from the 1950s, where, in the introduction, Hitch’s shadow approached a line-drawn silhouette of himself. I added another arc at the bottom to represent a nose and complete the upper profile.

The next domino was the name for the composition that popped into my head: Piercing Glance. The triangle was so sharp that it pierced the first blue arc. The only trouble was the first triangle was pointed in the wrong direction. I had to think a little more.

Several things occurred to me. First, the profile of the head could be inside a container, as represented by the blue arc. Second, it is coming up to be Halloween here in the States. What kind of profile would be looking out of an enclosed container. The Mummy of course.

It was an AHA! moment in the creative process.

I painted bandages, and an stylized Egyptian eye. The piercing glance made sense now!

I modified both of my initial strokes. I glazed the area outside the profile with Prussian blue; inside the profile, I used neutral tint and scored it with cross hatches for the bandages. Outside the limiting arc, I glazed the area outside the limiting arc with permanent mauve and cadmium red.

As the title of the post indicates, I paid more attention to my thought process than I did to the final outcome. I’m not unhappy with the result, however.