Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Uncaged Birds

8x11 watercolor on Italia 140 lb soft press paper.  It's the first one painted yesterday since taking Jan Fabian Wallake's Houston workshop last week. She recommended we take a photo and deconstruct it into geometric shapes totally unrecognizable using design principles then paint it. I took parakeets in a gilded cage, drew them and an archway on newsprint, disregarded the cage bars, and did lots of thumbnail sketches. Then with scissors I cut out another bird and arranged and rearranged on tracing paper until a composition emerged. The archways are now doors, the birds (black and white for contrast) are uncaged and free, with some pattern surrounding them.  Cool accents are in a warm color dominance; note the other bird at top by a slice of orange, rather bland and almost unnoticeable.  I'm thinking of painting this again in a larger format.

Below is a shot of the tiny photo.




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