Closeup on the wallpaper

2/29/08

There’s a noticeable difference in the texture of the paint, when you compare the bits I did first to the last ones on the panel. (What you’re looking at here is from towards the end of the process.) The color and light direction kind of wobbles around a bit, as well. I’ll have to keep checking back to this panel as I move on, to keep the variations from spiraling off in some random direction… but even that might not be a terrible thing, as long as it’s an even enough progression and I paint the panels in the right order.

Which is to say, I’m choosing to look at the rough bits my digital instincts scream to smooth out as a virtue, just like the visible pencil marks and the — what I guess is carpet lint embedded throughout it. As in, this is a painting, so I should stop trying to make it all smooth and seamless like a photoshop thing. Have to keep remembering to work with what the paint wants to do, instead of against it.

Which got noticeably easier when I remembered that I was allowed to use more than one paintbrush at a time — by the end I had this whole assembly system worked out: one chisel brush for the red underside, skipping around the border of one piece of the pattern until I’d covered every downward-facing edge. Then a thin round brush for the white highlights on top, skipping around again. Then various shades of pink as I filled in the diagonals until the whole rim was finished, like the edge of a jigsaw puzzle, and from there it was just a matter of blending the colors in towards the center, using a big soft brush in the larger areas. I’m not sure if I could be so systematic about it if there were more than two colors to deal with, but this will do for now.

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