I went to pull out a blank canvas, to make use of some of the blooms that are available. I came across this sketch for the purple spectre, one that I did a couple of years ago that I was also going to do with oil paint. I decided to go ahead and erase the pencil marks but something else happened instead.
I am not sure what I’m going to do from here, it’s destined to be Scryedye’d in some form.
It is going to be a fabulous, unstoppable year! We are a force of nature!
I wrote this a little while ago and forgot to post it. I have stepped away from this exploration as i discovered something was missing.
While originally intended to chronicle my exploration of Scrye Dye, with winter and the removal of all but the hardiest of Pansies for color, I have turned to oils for a piece I have been pondering for close to a year.
I originally started playing with paints about a year ago. First watercolors, then acrylics and finally oils. As I explore I have seen the myriad possibilities and am enjoying the learning process of how to get there. I had a # of projects in the works when I discovered Scrye Dye and set them all aside.
Now, it is time to get back to that work, wherever it leads, and instead of starting a new site just for it or whatever kind of categorization my mind might like to place it in, I will display it here along my other artwork.
This is the start of a piece that is part of an anti-consumerism series I have been kicking around for about a year. Now, the politics are not where I like to voice myself, simply stated I am still very much a part of the consumerist machine, but I see the cracks, I see the charades, it’s a Hollywood movie come to life, except we all get to be the stars in our own personalized version, be it comedy, drama or an eternal spin in Dante’s Inferno.
When will I stop my ride? Either when I choose to or am forced to and when that day comes I’ll figure it out. In the meantime, here are my thoughts on what we are doing.
The original sketch
Filling in the black
Sharpening the outline of the letters.
Adding the blue of the ocean
Starting to see something go wrong with the snake as I color it in.
I put on a scale pattern to see if I can get it back on track, while continuing to add other color.
Shortly after this, as I worked on the mouth it went horribly wrong. I haven’t taken pictures of that yet because I am not sure where to go from here. I am thinking about taking some art lessons to learn some of the things I need to know to reach the next level. Since this was a dry run for the canvas it accomplished what I had hoped it would. I know some of the basic design changes I would like to see to make it really work and then I need to figure out exactly how to paint it how I want it.
And this is where things come together to start becoming something or not.
This was the third piece I did. I primarily used the Black Lilly leaves here as well as the yellow from the Anthers.
The coolest part of this piece was some of the shapes that happened accidentally, I added plenty of things on purpose, but a combination of swirls and a speck of debris left behind from the petals, gave what I see as part of a wolves face as well as part of a females face behind it. Check it out and let me know what you see.
A different view of the same section.
This part here was a close up of some of the swirls from the bottom left corner.
All in all it wasn’t the look I was going for when I started but it was a great learning experience as to how the Black Lily behaved and some of the effects that could be created with it.
While I am trying to go chronologically until I get everything that I have done up until now down, I have had a few technical difficulties resulting in do-overs that I am not ready to go back and tackle as of yet.
So here is my work in progress. One of them anyway. I started this piece over the weekend, its the piece I have been meaning to get to since I did the first one and was inspired to play with the Pansies blue. It has of course gone in a different direction than I intended but I have a pretty cool vision for where it is going now.
Many of my stories go the same direction. They start with a cool idea but then the characters and other events take over and they end up somewhere near there, but also somewhere unexpected.
I only have the picture from the other day at the moment, I filled in the rest of the blue tonight and will probably do some more touch up tomorrow before going to the next layer. I will make an effort to get more shots, especially of the flowers I am using and the pages of the palette book, but it is hard to paint and lug(really, lug? like it’s so big) around an ipad and its technical stuff that just isn’t as fun when your are in the moment.
We are shopping for Tulips online at the moment, something I did not get to use this year but have been daydreaming about since I started to get into this and remembered how vivid their colors had been this spring. Can’t wait. So far I have seen a beautiful black, purple, red and a nice yellow to play with. And their anthers…the yellow I saw is making me drool.
I think I smell Huckleberry Cobbler, it must be time to go…
Though the black Hollyhock did cast the original demo piece in to chaos, it did inspire me to try something else. Though I didn’t actually end up using the Hollyhock on the next painting. This one is made entirely from the petals of a black Stargazer Lily and the yellow, the best yellow I have found thus far, from the pollen covering its anthers. Sadly, the ones in our yard have finished blooming for the year and taken their golden yellow with them.
The pollen carrier is pretty small, about the size of a large rice kernel, but produces a strong vibrant yellow and is great for going over other colors as it does not wash them away in its application.
I set out with a pretty direct idea on this one, something I don’t normally do. Here is the full image, followed by a couple of close ups.
So, why Scrye?
I wanted to find a name for what I was doing. I figured while it wasn’t likely a medium which an artist would likely use to paint with, with all of today’s modern choices, at the very least native americans and our ancestors used some form of plant matter to make the colors in their paintings. The closest I found in my few searches were related to using plants as dyes, which is essentially the same, but not entirely.
While some of the same colors are probably found in the plants they used, they are not strictly speaking devised in the same way. For me, extraction of the color comes from taking the petals, leaves, stamens or other parts and rubbing them against the canvas itself to bring out whatever color is on or inside the plant. There are many and there will probably be tons of posts covering this that and everything else regarding to some of the more interesting flowers and or colors I have found and how they come out on different substrates, but for now, let’s just leave it at many.
When you first start rubbing a petal against canvas, you will find that it leaves behind color, moisture and often times debris. It was after trying many different flowers that I realized each one behaved differently, some were dry(leaves of plants and pollens), others were very moist and came off runny(berries especially), some left behind debris which could be bothersome, others were sticky and hard to work with and some dry a completely different color than they start. Here is a good point to mention that many flowers do not give the same color as they appear and often times they can give more than one and other parts might give something else entirely, just like the yellow pollen from the Anther of a Black Lily.
I set out to make a classification system so that I could keep track of which did what and make sure that I did not use some of the more bothersome ones and accidentally ruin what I was working on.
And from that, the name was born.
As of this writing, the letters mean the following things
S – Scented, gives off an odor that may hopefully last after the material has dried.
C – Crumbly, leaves debris, can sometimes be brushed away with your hand, but may be bothersome.
R – Runny or potentially too moist, can also be sticky
Y – Leaf is dry, may require extra effort to get to the color
E – This one had a meaning, but I have since combined it with R, so for now it is just a place holder, until I determine the need for another descriptor.
D – Dries a different color than when it is wet
+ – Requires a lot of material to make swatch of color
– – Requires only a little to make a swatch of color