Continuing with colour, surface & scale experiments

During this past week, I've been considering how well my latest colour experiments against monochrome had been going. Therefore I carried on testing a wider variation of hues in order to refine and conclude the best combinations. My intentions were to find colours that were vibrant enough to create an eye catching focal point in the piece but also ones that showed contrast as well as relating back to my volcanic eruption concept. With this in mind I started creating more experiments:

The two compositions above just provide evidence of how much red can be manipulated by changing one simple shade in the fore or background. Despite that many of my previous experiments have suggested that white enhances the colours - I actually prefer the black background in this specific case as I gave the black time to dry therefore it doesn't merge wih the red which effectively makes the red more pigmented.

This piece I did quite bland and simple because I wanted to let it dry in order to later add darker areas to it with dry mediums.

The two pieces above I think both show good contrast and the one on the right also displays the use of my technique really well.

The four compositions above show the use of dry mediums over the top of wet ones which I really like, although this is a much longer process as I have to wait for the paint to dry before applying more layers.

This piece is really simplistic but demonstrates my technique in the best way, with a white emulsion background to enhance the vibrancy of the colour, a thick textured consistency at the beginning of the brush strokes and followed by a wash of transparency midway through. 

Here I intended to create a larger piece over a double page spread of A2. As well as carrying on using the dry mediums over the top but with more subtle elements of colour this time which I think as a whole works really well.

After these experiments I began creating ones with a new artists inspiration. Her name is Hsiao Mei Lin. The reason I began looking into this artist was because I thought some aspects of her work were really similar to mine such as how the colours on my compositions merge together and also the layering.

But one thing that separates us massively is our variation in medium and material use. Mei Lin uses oil on linen where as I have been mainly using emulsion and acrylic on paper/board. Considering this I attempted to use the mediums on offer to create similar marks to Mei Lin.

This was the first one I tried. I began with a wash of acrylic on the background and then I put black ink over the top whilst the acrylic was still wet.

 Here you can see the stages of the ink slowly merging more and more. Which created really interesting shapes and movements. I think this represents Mei Lin's work really well (shown on the right)

I think this is the best stage of them all because I have also incorporated some large areas of yellow acrylic paint for contrast, texture and a highlight on the limited palette. 

But the only problem with this was the out come once the piece had dried. All the interesting marks had disappeared and the marks spread all across the page as I carried it to the drying rack.

 Considering the experiments above, I created something that was more substantial in terms of mediums therefore I just stuck with acrylic paint. This was better as it didn't run over the page but the marks were not as interesting and yet again, once the piece had dried it looked completely different - it lost colour vibrancy and texture.

Considering the two previous experiments, I wanted to create something with a balance so I used a lot of water on my brush to create a wash on the background and then I applied thick acrylic over the top. Due to the water, the colours still merged and due to the lighter background the colour was still as vibrant once the piece had dried. The piece below my experiment was the inspiration I used from Mei Lin.