September 21, 2011

    Well, I knew I should have abandoned this start - and my one consolation is that I was right! I worked on it a bit more, and the main positive thing I got out of it was practice experimenting with things that are soft and out of focus. Still, I could tell that no matter what I did to it I wasn't ever going to like it (the true definition of a bad start) so I decided to use it to experiment with oil pastels since I found a box in the basement and I haven't used them before. 
     That was also a bad move, since I discovered that a single mark with even a very pale yellow oil pastel could pick up graphite from a very lightly shaded area and turn it into a black mark! See the bright yellow half way up on the right with the black slash under it? That black slash is actually bright yellow on very pale shading... Ooo! Just what I was looking for! Random black marks! So - I took the oil pastels and squiggled here and there just to see how far I had to stay from the shading to avoid picking some up, how little it took, what happens if I went from clear areas into shaded areas, and so on. I even took a very pale yellow and moved it around some in the shading along the right edge to see if I could wring some effect out of the combination that might be useful in any way. It doesn't seem likely. 
     So - I learned not to use graphite to sketch when I expect to follow with oil pastels, and to listen to myself when I suspect I should just abandon a bad start to the wretched place all bad starts go...