When I’m working on an artwork, it always seems to go like this – it starts out great and I’m jazzed about working on something new. There’s an initial ramp-up period where I fumble a bit, but once I get into a rhythm with the new work, things hum along.
Then about half way through, the painting stops cooperating. It doesn’t respond to what I’m doing. I don’t know what it needs and every thing I do seems to make it worse. I call it “those awkward teenage years”. It’s just a phase. A little perseverance and patience, and we all come out better than when we started.
Yesterday, I was working on a collage. I had started it about a year ago and set it aside when I ran out of ideas. I picked it back up yesterday and decided to try a different approach.
Good idea. Things were humming along.
Late in the evening, I decided it needed a wash of color to tie the elements together.
Have you ever done a watercolor wash and then laid a piece of crinkled plastic wrap on it until the paint dried? The plastic smooshes the paint around making a wonderful organic pattern. Love it.
So I put down a wash of gorgeous color, covered it with plastic wrap, and went to bed.
This morning, I ran downstairs to see how it looked.
When I pulled on the corner of the plastic wrap, it didn’t budge. When I pulled harder, some of it came up, taking the surface of the collage with it. Most of it stayed stuck in place.
I’d forgotten that this is a watercolor technique. You can’t use plastic wrap with acrylic paint. They’re both plastic.
Son of a rascal stinking blasted piece of what was I thinking? I know better. I KNOW better!
Art Supply Rule:
plastic + plastic = stuck
Corollary:
plastic wrap + acrylic paint + image transfers done with acrylic gel medium = doomed
Today has been spent coaxing plastic wrap off paint. This collage might be salvageable if I can camouflage the bad spots. If not, it will have to be cut up and used as bits for other collages. Breaks my heart, but I’ve learned my lesson.
So sometimes and artwork takes a turn for the worse because it wants to. Other times, it takes a wrong turn because the artist is an idiot.
The title of this post comes from a twitter conversation I had over the weekend with an artist. He’d had a rough day of painting and announced that he was “throwing his toys out of the pram”. I hadn’t heard that expression before, but I know a tantrum when I hear one.
And that’s how I feel today.