watercolor, 10 x 15" panels
3/2009

The point of this assignment was to create chaos and then impose order. This example is from the watercolor workshop I'm participating in, but it reminded me of an experimental drawing assignment I had years ago.

For this incarnation, we traced contours (inner and outer) of Vogue models onto a gessoed mat board. We then painted in sections with watercolor and quickly burnished it with a sheet of watercolor paper. You could control the outer contours, but you had to work quickly or the watercolor would dry. The professor rigged the assignment a bit by dictating that we have two complete figures that contrasted in color temperature with the rest of the painting.

The top of these two panels is the gessoed mat board. I finished the project early, so I played around with the line quality of the traced lines. After having Glenn Felch's "tease in a little corner [of value or color variation]" and "line quality! line quality!" catchphrases drummed into me for a few years...I wasn't all too surprised by how profoundly the few small touches improved the gessoed mat board's appearance.

It's a fun experiment. Try it!