Today’s watercolor experiment:

Thankfully, I was able to conquer the blankness of the watercolor paper. I was worried about that yesterday. Today. I continued my visual exploration of sleep.

I did some preliminary drawings on a sketch pad. Nowadays, when I draw non figuratively I always think of Paul Klee’s metaphor: taking a pencil point for a walk.  I try to simplify and minimize the lines I draw. This was a most interesting exercise. The underlying sketch for today’s study consists of only two lines (not counting the facial features which include four other lines: two for the eyes, one for the nose and one for the mouth). There are, in fact other lines in this composition; however, they were formed by the abutment of contrasting color fields.

Design:

In my two previous studies, ‘Sleep‘ and ‘All Together Now‘, among the major design element was a profile of a head. Today, I used a frontal view of a face. I opted to place the head in a Brancusi-like, tilted attitude. This I felt, would be consistent with the idea of someone at rest.  The other important pictorial element is the line that divides the face. I serves both as a separator and unifier, visually creating two parts of the face and joining them, when seen as hands clenched together.

Day Dreaming
9″x12″ 140# Cold Pressed Watercolor Block

Process:

After I decided upon the overall design, a rendition of a head resting on interdigitated hands, I spent some time thinking about designing the color placement. I first thought that the area above the head should be a deep blue-black. But that would not work with the theme: daydreaming.

I began with a wash of cerulean blue, a color commonly used for skies, on the left half of the top of the paper. At the middle of the paper, I blended it with the darker indanthrone blue. I wanted a smooth transition from light to dark, indicating that, although the subject was a day dream, dreaming is usually associated with nighttime.

I wanted the area hidden behind the interdigitated fingers to be colored differently than the area that did not intersect with the face. I used my formula for flesh tone (cadmium red light, yellow ochre and titanium white) for the arms and the head.  I painted the arms with a pinker version of the skin tone and the head with the skin tone weighted more to the ochre side.

I used peacock blue and cadmium red light on the area of the intersection between the face and the hand on the right-hand side of the composition; phthalo green, perinone orange and lemon yellow to color the hand on the left-hand side.

Comment:

I am satisfied with the simplified drawing and my choice of colors and their placement. Since the subject of this study was dreaming, I wanted a visual ‘surreality’ at the intersection of the flesh and the mind (as represented by the head): that area of the head ‘behind’ the hands.

This study warrants further exploration. One thing I would do differently would be to substitute another pigment for cerulean. The cerulean, with its grainy constitution, did not merge well with the indanthrone blue. I would also darken the other colors of the background in order to bring the head and hands forward.