I had laid the ground work for my String Theory painting. I got sidetracked by my desire to purchase a custom frame. That was a bad experience.
I needed something to bring me out of my sulking.
So I got myself a new toy.
Well I am not ashamed to admit that I am willing to put my brushes aside, temporary at least, and give my new toy a run.
What better piece to experiment on than my String Theory?
I've never touched an airbrush before but that makes it more exciting. I am not spraying enamel or model paint. I am spraying ink and watercolor essentially so I shouldn't worry about clogging up my toy. I should be expecting better results than using my brush to write in the background color.
My phthalo blue solution was too diluted to reveal the alum solution succinctly, but the tracks were quite visible nonetheless. Notice my initial attempt to outline where the alum solutions should be written on the upper right hand corner. In the end I decided it was too cumbersome so I just did everything freehand.
After several passes with my airbrush, the flame like features of my string soup emerged quite interestingly. At first I was going to spray the whole sheet the same color, but then I liked the bands of clear spaces so I left them blank. I also mixed in a little green color. Martians are green, aren.t they?
After the paper had dried, I examined what had manifested. It had that cosmic look!
The spray was not as uniform as I had envisioned. That was a lot of fun however. I could see all those little white filaments inside the big blue torrent. Streams of hot radiation spewing from black holes.
I am sure I could improve on my spraying technique given sufficient time.
When I turned the gold speckled Xuan over, I did not see any seepage of the alum to the back of the paper. This was kind of disappointing for me. Part of the fun of painting with alum solution was to paint on the back side of the paper, taking advantage of the soak-through of alum from the front side. Ostensibly this gold speckled paper was less permeable to alum solution as I had anticipated.
I employed this painting from the backside technique with my snow scenes. Such as this one:
I played around with my painting by turning it upside down. The piece was abstract enough that there was no telling as to which side is north.
What I perceived now was a crashing wave, on a foaming sea.
Forget my string theory. After all that contemplating about what the first moments might be like, I was still painting water, unknowingly. I've gone off the deep end and back again.
The sea was more convincing anyways and a lot less abstract. No need to consider green Martians.
Interesting!
