The thought was this. I'd finished drilling holes and glueing metal loops into the tops of a batch of my smaller plaster eggs. They were ready to be painted, and I was planning on undercoating and then layering up the acrylic colour coats on them in an array of rainbow hues. But I swear, I wasn't even thinking about them one morning last week when suddenly I thought watercolour. WHAMMO! I thought of my previous experiments of colouring my plaster letters by soaking them in ink, and wondered why on earth I've never thought of colouring the eggs in a similar way. I knew, from the letter colouring trials, that the plaster has various densities that absorb the pigments to different degrees - an effect I wasn't pleased with at the time. WHAMMO! I had a vision of a plaster egg soaked in watercolour paint, and it was all mottled and lovely, picking up the textures of the plaster; dark in places and light in others, any textural differences in the plaster highlighted... I had to try it straight away.
I couldn't believe my eyes! They turned out exactly as I'd imagined. I could see that less colour was absorbed where I'd sanded the eggs. At the bottoms, where the plaster is denser (I think the smaller particles naturally sink to the bottom when I bang the moulds to get the bubbles out) hardly any colour went on at all. Inbetween, the colour was really rich, and any surface textures were picked out with denser pigmentation. The result was, for want of a better description, really watercolour-y, and I was so surprised!
I speckled them all up with white paint, sealed them with several coats of varnish, and sat back to look at them. They look like galaxies!
I know I said I was planning on retiring these eggs. I was wrong. They've evolved!
2 comments:
Pretty!!!
what a cool effect!
i love how ideas just appear like that when you're not doing much at all. that's why i like doing the washing up, that's when my ideas come!
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