June 15, 2010

'Austin' out of the darkness and into the light

I've been working on my Austin piece all day and I have successfully conquered the doubt faze. As I am typing this my last print, a bit of a cobblestone street, has just rolled out of the printer. When I started this morning all of a sudden things became clear and all the pieces fell into place, well, not literally, I still had to do some work...
When I make a piece there are always two critical stages, the one I just went through and the finishing stage when the paints come out and all has to become one. That last stage is still a long way away though. First I will have to deconstruct the puzzle and mark all the pieces on the canvas so they can find their rightful spots when they have been transferred to the acrylic gel. I will be taking reference pictures during this faze in case I forget to mark something, I tend to be a bit chaotic. Then I will get all my pictures mirrored and copied and then I can begin the gelling.
This whole gel transfer process takes a while so in the meantime I can worry about the the canvas underneath the gel layers. I want to do something special with the sky and since I am using a layering technique I will have to apply anything that is visible behind the buildings first, before I reassemble the piece. So I'll be gelling and painting next

June 09, 2010

‘Austin’ second stage

I have just printed and cut the first two picture for my Austin painting and I am now at the usual doubt faze of the project. I always have this moment where I'm not sure about my choice of subject, I'm not sure if I have enough material and if I made the right pictures in the first place. This will last until I find a couple of pictures that seem to fit, then things will start to feel better and I will be able to be happy with my choices. For now that point seems like a long way away though.
In these early stages of a piece I will be making loads of prints that I'm probably not going to use because they're either to big or to small or they just don't fit in the piece. I have long since given up on trying to save on photo paper because somehow that just doesn't work, all the cutting out an physically placing the pieces on the canvas like a big puzzle is just a part of my creative process that I can't seem to do without.
So for now you can imagine me switching from office to studio all the time printing, cutting resizing and changing images until the pieces fall into place...

June 08, 2010

Decided on the subject of my new piece

I have decided to do my next piece on Austin TX, this was the last city we visited before leaving the US for Canada and I've been wanting to do a piece about it ever since. I will be using an 18x36" canvas, I know I said that I would be doing some larger pieces but I just want to get a little more experience with this new technique and try out a couple of things before I go bigger. I want to see if I can go thin on my gel transfers and that is probably going to be harder as I go bigger so a bit more practice seems like the best way to go right now. 
The first thing I will be doing now is going through all my photographs of Austin and making a rough selection of the ones I might want to use. After that I will search for the one picture I definitely want to use and that will be my starting point, which doesn't necessarily mean that I will actually use that picture, sometimes my start out picture just doesn't fit any more as a piece develops.  
Next to all this I will be visiting some more galleries in Montreal early next week, to introduce myself and leave some materials. So I am updating my portfolio and artist packet so I will look good. Lets hope this round will be more productive then the one I did in November last year.