Cantilever
I created this piece as a homework assignment for Ardith Goodwin's online class The Outrageous Line. In it, I tried to mimic the kinds of techniques we were learning. I created a multi-layered abstract piece that uses a so-called cantilever compositional structure, where the basic structural concept is up, over, and partway down the other side. I started the piece on paper using acrylic paints and various pencils. Then I continued the piece on my iPad to more easily explore some ideas for continuing the piece.
I diluted muted grey paint and painted an uneven wash on watercolor paper. When diluted it has a violet cast. Then I used a big flat brush to paint some titan buff liquid acrylic paint onto the paper to form a sort of cantilever shape. When all that was dry, I used graphite and then water soluble black pencil to make lines, using the edge of a small piece of mat board as a pencil guide. The I painted a small amount of water over some of the marks to activate the water soluble pencil marks.
I added different colors of water soluble pencil and activated those areas with a small amount of water.
I scribbled with a white Posca pen.
I photographed the piece and imported it into SketchClub. On a layer above the artwork, I used a crayon (under Brushes) to softly color in some areas. I put each color on its own layer.
On a layer above those color layers, I added a layer for an off-white wash, as a ghosting effect. I used a hard round brush at medium opacity and size. The idea was to emphasize the cantilever shape but allow details of the lower layers to show through. I adjusted the layer opacity for the effect I was going for.
On a layer above that, I used a hard round brush and a crayon of the same color to softly color in some more areas. I set the brushes to medium opacity. I tried to mimic pulling paint from these areas in places by making long lower opacity strokes starting in those areas and moving well outside them.
On a layer above that, I scribbled with a yellowish white pen.
On a new layer just under the ghosting layer, I used a smallish hard round brush to paint green horizontal lines stretching the width of the canvas and over the entire vertical length of the canvas. Then on a new layer above the whites scribbles layer, I used a fine black pen to make some lines.
I want to soften the effect of the green stripes, because they feel too dominating. To do this, I added a new layer just above the stripes layer and changed its blending mode to “On.” This means that anything I put on this new layer will only show up on the stripes; it will not stray off the stripes. On this new layer, I used a small crayon brush with gold-colored paint to paint areas of the stripes gold. On this same layer I used the same method to paint reduced opacity white on some areas of the stripes. Then I reduced the opacity of the green stripes layer to 60%.
I felt there was too little interest in some of the ghosted areas of the image. So I decided to add a new layer and used a fine black pen and a fine gold pen to draw some scribbles in those areas. Because of the ghosting layer above this new layer, these scribbles are only faintly visible. Next I added a new layer at the top of the layer stack and used a small pen to draw black dots in areas of the canvas. I added another new layer just above the black dots layer, and I used the same small pen to draw smaller white marks inside the black dots. This creates areas of high contrast in the image that make the overall image more visually interesting. Next I wanted to add detail to the stripes by using a fine pen in erase mode on the gold-painted “on” layer just above the stripes layer, and scribbling with it. This removes gold where I scribbled. To further reduce the dominance of the stripes in the image, I went back to the green stripes layer and used a crayon in erase mode at medium opacity to gently erase over the stripes, leaving those areas more faintly visible.
I continued making the black and white dots in more areas of the image. Then I added a new layer at the top of the layer stack, and I used a fine black pen to draw short thin marks over some portions of some of the stripes.
As a final adjustment, I went back to the layer with the red color, and I reduced its opacity to 50%, so that detail would show through it from the photo layer. Then I increased the saturation of the layer to get the color intensity close to where it had been before lowering the opacity. I saved the image to my camera roll.
I opened the image in iColorama. I used Form/Crop to crop off the sides. I used Effect/Sharpen preset 4 to sharpen the image, adjusting the radius slider so as to use the smallest mount of sharpening that was needed. Next I used Form/Sort preset 3 at very low opacity and then Form/Sort preset 1 at very low opacity to add a very slight interesting effect to the image. I noticed some aliasing in the fine lines as a result of using Sort. So I used Effect/Denoise preset 4 twice to anti-alias. Then, because this softens the image, I used Effect/Sharpen preset 4 at low radius to sharpen.
