Pretty Real Behind the Veil

Ok, here’s the “mostly” final picture, at least it is the image that represents most closely what I was trying to express in my journal.  The problem again was with the media, as I had complications from layering the media.  I was intending to do thick transparent layer between establishing the background details and basic foreground image and some enhancements to details in the foreground and some features in the background that I wanted to float over the initial image, so I put down a coat of Golden clear gel.  But I accidentally put some rough grooves into the gel layer that interfered with my ability to smoothly lay down this second layer of detailing over the first, and the rough surface had no tooth for adding media.  It was really frustrating.  I adjusted the tooth by adding 2 layers of clear gesso and finished editing the image, which seemed to give me the details a little better, but when I put a layer of matte acrylic sealer, I got a haze over various parts of the image, some of which is consistent with the pronounced grooves, and some of it where I used graphite, stains, colored pencils and conte to complete the image detailing.  Here it is in the current form, with the haze very apparent:

I have now sanded this in some areas and knocked off the peaks though there remain some raised areas of the acrylic gel.  Though I tried to limit the sanding around the main image areas that were edited in the second layer, I still lost some of the work, and have made one final attempt to clean it up.  I’m not 100% happy with the image aesthetically, because it is difficult to rework it at this point without risking losing some of the detail that I really like, and I already feel that I’ve overworked it in some areas as it is and I don’t want it to become muddy, so I’m stopping any more edits to the image itself at this point.  All that I am focusing on now with the work is to try to bring up the clear finish until it is as smooth as possible and there is no more haze. 

I’ve added a layer of clear tar gel, though I had already removed the picture from the wood backing that kept it stiff and taping it back on did not give me a completely flat surface to pour over.  There are some slight waves in the paper now, despite its thickness.  So what I’ve done was to do the pour with clear tar gel and used a straight edge like a scree to try to make the gel top surface as flat as possible (trying to avoid adding texture to the surface if possible).  I’m afraid that the final image may have lost some of the nice detailing that is visible on physical inspection that isn’t as clear on the scanned image, but we’ll wait and see.  The clear tar gel is still drying right now.  However, I can already tell that much of the transparency has been restored, and I’m just waiting for the gel to completely dry so I can see if there is any remaining haze. 

From a technical standpoint, there were a few surprises and lessons learned about the media that I was working with, besides what I mentioned above.  One was that once I started putting acrylic paint & stain on the paper, my colored pencils didn’t work well at all, even after adding clear gesso over it.  I had a clear feeling that the pencils had to be pressed harder than would have been tolerated by the acrylic without looking scratched.  I used acrylic stains for several areas of coloring, like the background and in particular all the coloring of the tree stump.  Some was diluted with blending gel, and some was not diluted.  I used staining medium for the first time, which is really cool, because once you mix it with the acrylic paint, if it dries, it is reworkable indefinitely until it is sealed, which made it very much like watercolors.  This was especially cool because, just as I got my paint pallet of pre-mixed stain colors ready to do some adjustments, one of our cats started misbehaving in the next room and I had to stop and deal with that, and my stains had already started drying on the pallet, but were easily refreshed with just a bit of water. 

Notice the looking glass in the background (rose colored).  The story is in the next post.