For this piece, as with the previous one, I was hoping for a faint scratchy surface texture, like a print from a scratched negative or an etching. My attempts to do this with beeswax were messy and unsatisfactory, so I decided to use the slight-resist properties of gesso to do the same thing.
I had an image in my head, something floral and radially symmetrical. I used a compass and sketched this flower. I wanted something like a Japanese cherry blossom boss. Naturally, the images in my head look nowhere near as cool as the ones on paper. After I had the outline, I filled it in with red marker.
I’d just like to say for the record that markers have never really impressed me. They always seem like little-kid toys. Even crayons have more of a place in my art than markers. My sister swears by them for inking rubber stamps, and I suppose they do that well, but they are very underwhelming in other contexts. One color will stain another marker, for example, so if you’re filling in a black outline with a red marker, your red marker will get black on it and stain black therever after. They’re also completely water-soluble, which can be a pain or a boon.
I decided to call it a boon when the gesso smeared the flower. It still looked okay. I painted gesso and clear acrylic medium over the rest of the watercolor paper and let it dry. When it was dry, I went over it with sandpaper, rubbing it in circles. After brushing the dust off, I painted it with India ink, then quickly washed it under the faucet.
That worked beautifully. Unlike with the wax, with gesso and acrylic medium, you have a huge amount of control over how well or little the ink stays The ink didn’t wash out of the lines, since they were incised down to the paper.
I wanted a bird of some sort, and my first thought was to do an oil paint/gum arabic print from a photocopy. I decided to save that for another piece, as that sort of printing is more blobby and indistinct and I wanted an image that brought out the fine lines. Instead I just drew a little sparrow with an 005 ink pen.
