More Alum

Having time to step back and re-examine my last painting, as I was having problem deciding which side would be my "top side", I've decided to display the animal with its head pointing to the left side of the paper.

I prefer this orientation perhaps due to the slight slant of the road edge, giving the frame some direction, for which the animal is responding to.  It's hard to say;  it's just a feeling.  I also thought that the straight lines of the lodge pole pines are less obtrusive.  The same lines seemed a lot darker on the other side of the paper;  perhaps that was the side I painted on.  I am thus in effect looking at the back side of the painting now.

Looking at what I wrote in the last blog, this is exactly the case.  I started the painting by painting the elk with its nose pointing to the right of the paper.  I am therefore using the back side of the painting as the top side now.

I am having second thoughts about my added brushstrokes to the snow covered path.  My intent was to describe the undulating surface of the road but I fell victim to the equally spaced rhythmic strokes of my brush.   Instead of random irregularities of the road surface, I've made it out to be a mogul jump event now.  I regret that I've over-produced this piece of work, as a sound engineer might have said.  Whereas at a sound studio one could take attenuate or even delete individual tracks, that luxury is non-existent here.  Oh well.

So I thought I would give painting with alum another try.  It was definitely excited about exploring the nuances of painting with alum.

For this attempt, I decided to be a little bit more methodical.  I wanted to paint the same scene, but instead of placing a lot of dots and dabs of alum solution, I tried defining each tree.

Basically I was treating the snow laden branches as petals of a flower.

Using a light ink wash, I covered what I have laid down to help reveal the white patches and margins left by the alum solution

The back side of the panting after the initial ink wash

The alum solution in the brushstrokes helped to fix the ink before it migrated out too much into the Xuan, and also made the paper less permeable to future coatings of ink.  Thus by judiciously manipulating the tone and placement of additional ink, the appearance of snow was achieved.  

The above was the side I painted on.  

Picture below was the the back side of the same painting.  A little bit subdued and dreamy when compared with the painted surface.