Work in Progress

I am working on piece for the SSI Lay Members' Day exhibition. 

The poem 'Kingfisher' appealed to me because I regard the occasional views of a kingfisher on our local stream as very special. You can never count on seeing one but if you always stop and just look for a while you may just catch sight of one. I took my camera with me and recorded some shots of the places I have seen the kingfisher in recent weeks

 

then I played with some of them on the computer and iPad with Photoshop using artistic filters

 this is the view I used for the background, simplified with the filters to softer areas of colour

 I tried looking at this view of a side stream too but the water was going away from me and I wanted the flash of the kingfishers flight to cross the screen

I tried this view too further upstream (a different kingfisher is seen on this part of the river)

and blocked in some text on Photoshop, just to try out some spacing

Then using a board that had a sheet of cream Canson paper already stretched on it I started to experiment with the background. I used a lot of FW ink and clingfilm effect and then added some sepia ink with bubble wrap on another layer - then decided it wasn't working and painted over it all with Plaka. The aim was (fortunately) to create a waterproof background that I could write on.

the background was still too dominant so I put a layer of pastel powder 

over it before I wrote the poem out and added a streak of turquoise gouache. 

I was quite happy with it and cut it off the board.

 then I tried it again on piece of black Ingres paper which worked a bit better ...so...

I decided to wash the writing off the background and start again!

quick pause to make a valentine card

then it will be back to drawing board!