Tuesday

The Gatehouse at Burton Agnes

The days are beginning to get similarity to them. I rise early and often there is a rain shower in the morning somewhere between 6am and 9am, although today a very heavy downpour caught me as I made my way to the summerhouse studio.  There I sort myself out and begin some prep work, such photograph and review the previous day's work. Today I started a doodle book - a short concertina like flier from a takeaway outlet. I gessoed it and started to randomly cover it with bits of the colours I was working with at the time. I must admit by the end of the day this doodle book/fliers was a bit of a dog's dinner of colour. I am not sure what I will do next - stamp and doodle,  zentangle on it, use it as a diary or collage onto it? It does not matter for at the moment - it is a base for future work.

One of the reasons the colours are such a mess is that I was trying to mix a raw sienna colour, having left my tube of shop bought raw sienna at home. I was also trying to mix was a neutral grey.  I do not have this colour in my mind's eye for I rarely use it and I only have it in watercolour paint not acrylic. My attempt came out as a rather lovely very pale mauve but with a very chalky appearance, however, that may have been down to the cheap paint I am using! I have my normal white acrylic paint but I must have acquired this cheaper version that got popped into the limited collection of 'Burton Agnes Hall' paints. My thinking being 'you do use an awful lot of white paint so take a spare to use for some of the early layers'. The trouble is that when you are in the thick of it you just reach out for the colour without checking the label. Lesson to be learnt there. 

Any way, a reason for all this stems back to a colourway design I had seen somewhere and a conversation with one of our visitors about collage. Not so much the collage where it is embedded within a painting but more about where the papers have their own voice. So I began painting my own papers using old book papers and working with them in a small way in an upcycled old book. I had removed many of the pages to reduce the bulk and stuck two or three pages together to give them more stability. I had popped it in my bag, fully gessoed, but with no real purpose in mind. In fact, it had been acting as a tea cup coaster. I think my mini collage book will be a more appropriate use for my little hard backed book.