Experimental

“Waterfall”

Ink, Gouache, Acrylic

Objectives:

• In order to break out of my comfort zone of working in realism and loosen up in terms of process, my journey began by pushing the media I typically work in, which is acrylic. I set out to make my shape edges softer and expressionistic. In this particular piece, I started with different colored inks and applied water, salt, and spray fix to push the media around in an unpredictable way. Once it semi-dried, I began to see shapes form. I would squint my eyes and try to connect relative shapes into a larger mass that could resemble something in an interesting way that I may not have been able to draw directly myself. I then added gouache to some areas to make it slightly more opaque and edit some of the spontaneous marks into more legible shapes that the viewer could decipher. Finally, I used acrylic in the blue/green mist to push a sense of depth and color saturation.