Another 'killed' Catalogue.

As you can see from the first photo, it's actually a killed phone book, or rather a quarter of one which leaves me with three more bits to deal with. I shall have to come up with some new ideas before I tackle them. It looks rather cold and grey here, but is more bronze and warmer.

.

I remembered to take some before and during shots for once. First you see it with just a few strokes of gesso, then totally gessoed (sounds like a good night out!!) plus Quink sprayed on. I thought I had overdone the Quink it looked so dark, but by morning had dried back to almost white. Next I sprayed it with Moonshadow mists and placed some of the paperclay faces in the gouged out spaces. I knew they'd come in handy for something - a perfect reason for impulse buying! I added a couple of broken Celtic patterned pieces to the central area to help fill up the space. It was looking in need of tonal contrast so I fiddled about with crayons and inks to darken the central background, then decided it needed a border of some kind. I made more paperclay casts using just half of one of the back sections of the chess men, painted them dark grey and stuck them around the edges to suggest a very damaged, ancient something-or-other with a broken border. To bring up some of the relief details I rubbed on a gold and a dark gilding cream.

.

It would probably have been better to embed the casts into thick gesso, but I wanted untextured areas and with such a limited space to work in I couldn't see how I could go about it. Perhaps I'll be able to do it with the next one.
.

The real artists among you will cringe at my haphazard method of working. When using paint and inks I am out of my comfort zone and flying by the seat of my pants. There are things I should have thought of earlier in the process so that everything can flow in an orderly sequence instead of trying to alter an area which has already been fixed in place and painted. Never mind - we live and learn, and there is still a lot of learning to do, but it's great fun.
.

I have also discovered that if I use a fullstop at the beginning of the line above a new paragraph, I can keep a space between the paragraphs. I picked up that idea from Maggie Grey's blog - thankyou Maggie. I hope it will work here - we shall see.