UPDATE ON LARGE CANVAS EXPERIMENT

PROCESS OF DOING A LARGER EXPERIMENT

I have decided that I am going to create a larger experiment which will incorporate imagery of walking into afterlife by a bridge where the planet will act as a background on the top half of the canvas, as there is a bridge in the middle of the composition as it distorts to getting smaller in the distance, whilst underneath I have imagined there to be a dark and long drop if the bridge breaks, this is what i imagine to happen to those who do bad when they are living on earth. I am going to take inspiration from the colours I have been studying regarding the galaxy and out of space themed colours, such as purple , dark but vibrant reds, blues of different tones and blacks. Furthermore I aim to involve different techniques such as ink mixed with PVA, adding oil pastels on the top of materials to highlight and exaggerate texture, I am going to layer the textures so it extenuates the texture you would see on a planet, I gained inspire from the hubble and planet books as they focus mainly on the texture and shapes (mostly circular).

The step by step plan:
1. Draw a simple outline on the canvas marking the scenario
2. Begin to create pieces of the planet to stick together onto the canvas
3. Then begin to fill in the outer parts of the bridge which will be full of darker tones to show that the bridge is in the middle of nowhere.
4. Create more texture and build up the colour that is seen in the planet at the top of the composition, I want to include plastic melted and worked upon so the viewer cannot acknowledge the primary materials I have used.
5. Create the bridge by having  step by step blocks leading up to the planet, i will a different material and medium for every different step, for example, for the bigger steps and the bottom of the composition there will be bigger steps with more mediums to show whereas ass the bridge gets smaller, so will the blocks, so they have to be very intricate. ----- I am wanting to have the bridge very colourful as i want the colours to contrast with such a textured, dark background on either side. 

                                                                              

 I began by creating parts of the planet in the background and following from the reflections from when I added melted cling film to ink and PVA, I began by getting a piece of acetate and then stuck on a ripped piece of newspaper because I knew that adding the PVA onto acetate straight away would not stay put not would it keep its texture when I were to dry it. When sticking on the newspaper I added a lot of PVA as I wanted it to be thick and so that when it were to dry, the PVA wouldn't sink in and soak into the newspaper completely. I used a small brush to add the blue ink because following from the experiments I did I found that to make it more pigmented I would need to evenly mix the ink across the PVA and not just in one area. I then did the same with red Indian ink and decided to use small swirling motions to mix both colours together, I used both blue and red ink because from the experiments I found that they had a very strong relation to the galaxy theme that I was researching at the time, but to make it more textured similar to a planets surface, I needed to add more PVA whilst ensuring that it would dry completely. I then added cling film over the top because when I were to dry it, the cling film would tightly attach itself to the PVA to create a rough, spiked texture.

For this part of the collage I was planning to add it to the planet on the top half of the background and was portraying the colours on this 'afterlife planet' to appear more colourful and bright, in contrast to the scenario of arriving at the planet by a bridge whilst underneath the bridge will hold darkness, emptiness and colder colours with sharper texture and different materials that represent tones of lines and shapes. For this piece in particular I used acetate as a primary surface with a textured thin material which was newspaper, with this cut out I ensured that there were lots of text on the piece because I wanted the ink to show through on the other side of the acetate more obviously.

I have updated this small scale untextured piece which i will add to the planet by adding clingfilm technique and melting it on top of the ink, now that it appears to have a lot more of a shaped texture i am able to emphasise the texture of the circles and holes that have been created by the splitting of plastic as it hardened. As you are already able to see i have begun to surface the texture with a black oil pastel by gently putting pressure onto the thickest layer of plastic, i can shadow the layer of plastic to make it seem like there is more depth to it than there actually is. 

After the visual inspiration i gained about the fireworks and after I had done experimentation regarding the movement of them, i liked the way that the PVA when mixed with colour ontop of a charcoal background defined the direction of the patterns created by both the dried emulsion as a textured surface and the PVA.

I decided that would re create one of the fireworks exploding and i would build up the texture by mixing pVA with watercolour in the colours yellow and pink because from the photos I had taken, these were the two that struck me the most especially as they were reflected into a black background. I am planning on cutting this image up into a smaller scale so that it is not obvious what i have created as i do not want to directly link the fireworks imagery into my work, but instead create and continue the amount of texture on the composition. I could highlight the highest parts of texture with oil pastel to really grab the viewers attention of the layers that have created such a rough edged effect.

Once layering the two opposing cut out pieces i decided to take inspiration from Gerhard Ritchers work of using smudging techniques to combine colours to one another but instead i have used oil pastels to created such an effect, i used the colours blue, a cool green and a purple to create movement marks, i used my finger to smudge the colours together because i want to portray that the planet of afterlife is moving, however, i still wanted to visually see a breakage of these dark colours blended so i chose to use a white papered surface, i think this really works with the college as it gathers the human eye mostly towards this piece in particular. however, i am planning to layer other smaller cut outs over the top because  mostly want to portray a good use of high texture on the planet.

Also, you are able to see a build up of newspaper being stuck one on top of the other and my main aim is to create a mountain like layered texture, i have done many of these in my experimentation and believe it works as the material is flexible whilst easy to work onto when it has been hardened. I plan to add a layer of clingfilm over it with a wash of emulsion. 

Here you are able to see the process of when i added a thin wash of emulsion over the layer of clingfilm because i know that when it hardens over the clingfilm and newspaper, i will be able to melt it and hopefully it will begin to create solid circled holes, eventually revealing the composition underneath.
Also, When the newspaper had hardened by doing a wash of thin PVA and drying it i was able to add colour to it so i chose to use a blue watercolour because it will be socked into the PVA slightly whilst still revealing small parts f writing from the text but still contrasting with the emulsion and matching with the colour theme of the planet (I used a small brush to apply the watercolour, hence the reasoning for the colour to be so pigmented).

This is the result after i had heated and dried the emulsion and began to see it seeping through and revealing the colour beneath, i am planning to fill the yellow emulsion with a black ink i think so i am able to present the layer of covering with shadow in the places where the emulsion may have folded, or where the clingfilm has shrunk considerably in particular places.

In a previous image you can probably notice that there is a thick plastic which is covering the PVA and ink mixed composition and i have done this with a fishing net like material because when i was doing experimentation, it really did create a lump of texture which almost gave a feeling of it protecting the composition behind it. I purposely stuck it on this side of the composition in the planet over the oil pastel comp because i fell ink it did not gather enough texture as it is on a flat texture. I melted this piece of material as it clustered into a small like bundle but has created a brilliant scaly texture in which moved upward onto another part of the collage.

Taking on from the experimental stage from movement when i used different mediums to create blur i decided that again, like gerhard Richters work based around the mix of paint, i wanted to showcase the direction of movement of which the planet would be moving at, i used watercolour and began using colours such as purple, dark blues and a teal green and began nightly brush stroking them across the brown papered surface, i had scrunched up the material before hand so that the non shaped lines would create a pattern of texture. This will not be kept like this as i am planning on layering other mediums on top. 

I have again used oil pastels in the colours purple and black to highlight the warmth of this planet that i am presenting as an idea of afterlife, i have used a black oil pastel to signify the shades of purple as i did not want to just have one block colour, although i believe it relates to abstract art as i want to route it to more of a surrealistic perspective. Like how the media has picked up the texture of the canvas, however, it is building up the texture and i want the colours to be hidden behind the texture so the colour on the primary surface background is not too appearing as abstract. What i have done here is layered a single piece of cling film, added lots of PVA over the top to fill in the texture to make to more crisp and will then add another layer of clingfilm, just so that the outside background layer is thicker than the middle of the composition.

You can see how successful the clingfilm and PVA was by the crisp of detail created around the oil pastels and how the thinnest layer of clingfilm stuck to the actual medium underneath, I feel ike this amount of texture alone portrays a single shape of how deep the texture of this planet is and this is what  was ideally trying to get at before creating such a final piece. I want to expose the use of colour underneath so i will enhance it by using an oil pastel to evenly drag the colour across and into every minor detail, such as the holes created by the melting of clingfilm. I plan to use a vibrant green colour because it highlights the shades that are much darker underneath it, I will then use a mustard yellow colour in a watercolour medium to define the shapes mounted by the hardened PVA and plastic over the top.

 After i have created a lighter composition i will add black chalk to dig into the much deeper holes and shapes where texture is not as exaggerated by the yellow and green, I aim to tone down the amount of pigmentation by the yellow watercolour, defining the thickness of the texture on the planet.

I have completed the aim of darkening the yellow and green tones from the previous composition and actually coloured over the netted plastic which i have melted with a black indian ink shade, i have done this because I wanted to darken and hide some of the colour behind it, almost creating a blanket to hide the beauty of such a colour. Relating to this, i ideally wanted to link it to the beauty of abandonment of the colour by hiding the colour and making the netted plastic to look like imagery of decaying.

I have taken an image from the B& Q advertisement booklet to get two doors as i am aiming o create an entrance for the planet of afterlife and underneath there will be a walkway of the bridge, i used an image instead of creating one via using a number of matters because its a collage and needed some sort of realistic photographs to acknowledge what it actually is. 

I have used some more ink and PVA techniques by dipping it straight on top of the page as i want to smudge it in-between other parts of the collage, the colour is a lot more pigmented and the PVA is very enclosed so it allows more texture to be settled onto the page, furthermore, i wanted to oppose the colours of the ink with the oil pastels to pick up the texture so i carried on with the re occurring theme of using green and orange oil pastels. I believe that only adding pressure to the middle of this composition really does even out the ink and PVA mixture to spread it with the other parts f the collage, i think that i were to colour over the whole of this composition then it would look very blocky and could hide the pigmented colours from the mixed inks.