Day 1: Surface Prep

Started next piece in preparation for a group show hosted by 2R Art in their new gallery space in Soho, London called Rook & Raven, alongside Dale 'vn' Marshall, DAIN, Julien Spianti, James Dawe and Daniel Lumbini.

Prior to any oil rendering I generally spend anywhere from 4-8 hours preparing a surface for the work. This surface acts as separate composition that the painting can fall into whenever there isn't any real areas of interest as well as saturating any colours that are used in the rendering process.

In this first stage I'm solely focused on producing gradiated washes using colours and embelished colours that are prevalent in the reference imagery. The placement of the washes is somewhat relevant but I'm not solely focused on where they're place as long as smooth colour transitions are produced in this lay-flat-soak.



I've added a layer of drip using the same colour from the previous soak simply to add another layer of depth to the under-painting. This also softens any previous stroke edges.








Line drawing is transferred using white charcoal transfer sheet



A quick rummage through stacks of wallpaper, unique printed material, scrap-booking materials as well as giftwrap papers.











Paper laminating starts pretty erratically. I'll choose a larger facet to get down and possibly extend some of the proportions and extend contour lines. With the first few piece I LITERALLY do not know what's going on. Eventually I'm focused on producing colour and directional relationships with more paper that I add. I'm also trying to have the composition "stand-alone" before I start rendering.

In this case I've struggled with having the abstract forms stand confortably as if due to a large amount of black, dark blue and green all across the bottom section.

Final stage of the surface prep has been left to soak flat in order to soften some of the edges of the collage work.