I’m continuing to work on my art journal spread of the deer. Clearly, she’s not a normal deer, but I’m unsure of exactly what she is. Perhaps she’ll reveal that answer as we continue. Here’s where I am so far.
When I stopped last weekend, I had an experiment coming up next. I’d drawn this deer on tracing paper because I wanted to get the size right, but I couldn’t resist continuing with the drawing and, before I knew it, I had a drawing I liked on that tracing paper—a drawing I didn’t want to just waste. So, how could I use it?
Here’s what I decided to do.
First, I would spray the drawing with Krylon Workable Fixatif to stabilize it. Next, I sprayed the fixative on the back side as well. Then I painted the back side with gesso, but only behind the deer herself. I hoped this would give me an opaque backing. I would tear out the deer, tearing as close to her as I could, then glue her in place on the spread.
Wisely (and uncharacteristically), I decided to test the process first.
Here’s the result. It worked pretty well, but with one glitch that I thought I found a solution to. At each step, the tracing paper wrinkled, and the wrinkles remained even when dry. But I found that if I added heat with my hair dryer, the wrinkles went away. So, that was good. I knew that this test piece was pretty small, but I didn’t think anything of it except to note the fact.
So, I proceeded with the deer. But no amount of heating with the hair dryer removed the wrinkles! Maybe the size mattered after all.
I didn’t feel I had any choice but to proceed, hoping that maybe tearing her out of the surrounding tracing paper would help. It was easy to tear very close to the deer, but the wrinkles were still there.
I was very careful when gluing her to the spread, removing any air bubbles which formed under her by carefully pulling the tracing up and then smoothing it back down again. I couldn’t do that very much though because the tracing was fragile.
Here’s how it looked. There were a few wrinkles, but not a lot. I judged it perfectly OK. By the way, the little dark areas you see towards her lower chest resulted when I pulled the tracing up to smooth it down again, but bits of the gesso on the back remained stuck to the spread.
So, what to do now?
I like her sort of ghostly quality. But a ghost isn’t quite what I wanted. I also knew I didn’t want a fully, richly colored realistic (except for the wings, of course) deer. On the other hand, I didn’t know what I did want, so I decided to proceed slowly and cautiously to add a little bit of color with light washes of fluid acrylics. You can see those results in the first image in this blog. I also added the rays of light coming through the window and some delicate gold work that you can’t see from the angle at which I took the photo.
Now it’s time for more contemplation, and when I get back to this piece next weekend I’ll hopefully have some ideas about how to proceed and—most importantly—who and what she is.
Meanwhile, I have a new technique for adding a drawing to a piece. I don’t know that I’ll find a lot of use for it, but I will find some and it was fun to try something new.
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