After taking about 3 months to complete a single collage (a funeral, end-of-school activities, and then summer trips have considerably slowed me down), I am finally moving on to the second one in the wonderful & amazing online workshop by Julie Prichard and Chris Cozen called Complex Collage.

This is on an 8×8 gallery-wrapped canvas. First I added the 3 architectural blueprints (from a sheet bought from Finchley Paper Arts) with soft gel gloss medium. I knew that I wanted the background color to be Van Dyck Brown, but I was concerned that it would be too dark. So I have come up with a two-part solution to counteract that: dilute it considerably with Acrylic Glazing Liquid, and also lay down some gold gesso before painting on the Van Dyck Brown. That did such a wonderful job underneath the acrylic inks, and I am hoping for the same results here.

Later . . .

In the middle of the lesson, I added a drawing of a Green Man onto my canvas and then painted it (shown in attached image before painting, obviously). At this point, I’m not too happy with what I’ve got. Too much opaque paint (the red oxide, I think), and I want the man to be coming out of the shadows, and that is definitely not what is going on–there’s no transition between the background and the image. I may have to post it where it is and ask for help.