Dreams of Amarna – Working on ideas
Collage of painted sketches for the Dreams of Amarna project
I’m still trying to think about and plan what to include, so I have been taking some of the photographs, and trying to produce paintings or drawings based on them.
This is serving a twofold purpose, as I have been developing my understanding of techniques, as well as learning how to distil the detail in the photographs. If it is important to simplify the sources in painting, it is more important in embroidery, where the effects created through stitch choice, thread choice, or the decision to raise the surface with padding also contribute to the final result.
The paintings aren’t particularly good, but that really isn’t the point of them, so I don’t mind. They aren’t finished pieces – I simply want to force myself to look at the photographic sources with an analytical eye. I hope then that it will come more naturally each time I find a bit I want to work on and embroider.
In fact as I look at this collage of paintings, I’m quite pleased. At least I have shown an appreciation of where the darks and the lights need to be, and those are what make a picture easy to understand.
I do agree about the darks and lights. Two of my most successful charcoal sketches started out as an exercise in trying to give the inpression of the solidity and weight of stone just by sketching shadows in strong sunlight.
Hi Rachel, you have an excellent working mood board here and I am sure it will inspire lots of ideas and methods of technique and colour. as for the pink lines……..I am so OCD that this piece is ruined in my head so it had to go!! already in the bin I’m afraid!!
Great sketches – and a good way of getting a feel of what you might like to do…
Aha! You’ve answered my question from two posts back! Yes I know that was two hours ago – I went off to watch the news, including Gordon Brown’s resignation. Actually I like these paintings, quite apart from their use to you of identifying light and dark – which I can see that they do.
[…] I’ve been working on something so relatively complex. It’s quite scary, but as I mentioned in a previous post, over the past couple of years I have also been learning to paint in watercolours, and I’ve […]