Plotting and Sketching

Worked on the Tarot card Knight of Swords earlier this week.

Today I'll either do a second round of color on the drapery, or work on the candelabra.

Spent yesterday going over my list of symbols, book titles, dates, and a phrase from a song I'm planning to include. I made a rough pencil sketch of the composition and tried different combinations.
Book titles are pretty straightforward - I know which ones I want to use, and which books I intend to pair them with. Playing around with the yellow drapery is both more challenging and more fun. It's actually patterned in red, and I plan to substitute Led Zeppelin references. For example, I want to use the winged Apollo figure of the Swan Song logo in place of a tiger.

I found a few photo references on Google for the capital S on the Swan Song stationary. I want to try placing it in repeating pattern where there is actually sort of paisley design.

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Korean chest, candles & curly hair

Put in the princess portrait. First round, and could be worse. From a distance it's not bad. It's mostly curly princess hair and candles all around, which handily echo the candelabra to the right. Putting it  in a frame really helped.


Spent the lion's share of the morning on that. Stopping nearly required an intervention, but until this layer is dry, all I'd be doing is stirring reasonably nice tones into mud.

To distract myself, I blocked in the big iron lock (in the center just under the sword). It's a wonderful old wooden chest, sold to me forty years ago as a Korean money chest.

I love the clasps and handles. There's metal bracketing each corner, plus a pair of large, hand-forged hinges. The top half of the front swings down, and there are a few small drawers along the top inside. There are metal handles on the ends for carrying it, like a camp trunk. No idea how old it really is. Bought it back in the early seventies from some antique place in the Carolinas. Probably Charleston or Mount Pleasant, but possibly along the road to Black Mountain. It's packed with old board games and puzzles from when the kids were younger.

Tarot & Ticket

Focused in on details of the O2 concert ticket, and The Lovers Tarot card. The concert ticket has a slice of planet earth with faint latitude/longitude grid lines and narrow spires (EDIT: in fact it's a view of the O2 arena itself, a tensile structure. "Most tensile structures are supported by some form of compression or bending elements, such as masts (as in The O₂, formerly the Millennium Dome), compression rings or beams." Thanks Wikipedia. ) with a round hologram moon and pinpoints of stars. There's some refining details to come here, along with the printed text and the O2 logo. Making those stratas of blues was a pleasure, and pondering what I'm going to do for the hologram is perplexing. Still thinking about it.

The Tarot card is simple; vibrant hues, mostly primary colors. I concentrated on not dragging or smearing colors into each other, yet smoothing and blending the edges between them. Not a task for the faint hearted. Once it's thoroughly dry, I'll work on outlining every object and figure in black.

After the loose volume and form of the marble bookends, doing the card's graphic design felt like painting a miniature. Even putting in the base color required my #0 and #1 brushes, but I like switching around from loose to precise. Artist's yoga.



Tech side bar: When you obsess on detail, you tend to mow through a lot of small brushes. They have a limited working life anyway - delicate to start, with fewer brush hairs, and those need to be exactly aligned. Rough use or poor handling turn them into something that looks like a squirrel's tail in no time.
After much trial and error I found Silver Ruby Satins. They hold up to the weight of oil, they load paint well and - if carefully cleaned - far outlast all others. I have 38 of them at last count, in the three smallest sizes. Mostly Filberts and Brights. I love them and treat them with respect. That's one of the reasons I have so many - they'll last longer if you switch around. The other reason is my kids figured out that they are a guaranteed hit for all those pesky gift giving occasions, like Mother's Day.

Bookends

This morning I roughed in the two hawk marble bookends. It took three hours, but at least half an hour was spent cleaning up my palette and mixing paint.

At the end of the day, I painted in the hilt of the sword by cleaning off my brushes. You can get the best neutrals from a dirty brush.

Here's a detail of the hawks - the one on the left has a broken beak. I'm going to look at the unbroken one in a mirror to figure out how to paint it.

Holy Grail

 
This morning I listened to a half hour press conference with the three living member of Led Zeppelin, promoting their concert video Celebration Day. It was surprisingly entertaining to hear. Plenty of dry wit and smooth, expert handling of the (worshipful) press.
Meanwhile, I painted the chalice. Patiently did lots of fine detail, because that's all it is. Blended very carefully. The reward is that it will only require a few more layers to be complete.

Bronze D'or

Roughed in the candelabra, on the right.

It's one of a pair of French bronze d'or candelabras. The way the light struck this is why I ultimately chose this particular image to work from.  I like the way the formality and heft of it balances with the ease of the organic, curving shapes. The final image will have an even starker contrast of light and dark.

En garde!

Today I began the sword. The metal blade is a series of reflections - like stitching together little abstracts. It's still far from what I'm aiming toward. It's like creating a sketchy map of shapes to help me build the layers I need to get the values I want. The hilt is wrapped leather. I also plugged in the first of many layers of white; on the candles, reflections in the chalice, the edges of the tarot cards and the concert ticket.

Buttercups. Doubloons. Saffron. Mustard.

Worked on the drapery, wallowing in the luscious color. I threw in the tangerine, since it's the same palette.


That's the last of the big sweeping brush strokes, laying in swathes of color. Now everything will slow way down as I tackle the intricate candelabra, the detailed tarot cards, princess portrait and ticket. Might get to skate a bit on the book spines, but even the sword blade is a series of reflections - candles flame, saffron drapery, and silver chalice. Yum.

old dog, new trick

Day #2



Looks like more than it is. I mean, I can confidently block in a base coat, but the smartest thing I did was go to Binders and buy a brush the size of a mop (okay, slight exaggeration) with stiff bristles that can handle oil.

Here's what I usually paint with, next to the new brush.


Right tool for the job.

Fired Up, Again

Today I dove into mixing and placing the various blues in the background of The Commission.  Started scrubbing that first thin layer of paint into the canvas. Four hours later, I had to make myself stop for lunch. Loving it! It's like the starter's gun fired off in my head. Instead of my usual country mix, I painted to Led Zep on shuffle. Really liking the BBC sessions. One of the things I like about this stage is seeing elements become visible from the negative space of unpainted canvas.

Worked on Fire yesterday. Added a title of my unpublished novel ms and my name to the open paperback flyleaf, the red lettering on the journalism book, and all kinds of ash details to the iron grill. Started refining the page edge of the open book and, bam, I realize I'm nearly done. What a pleasure this series has been!
  

Discovered in the Attic

Putting together elements for a Led Zep themed still life. Might do a companion piece with elements from  that era in my life. A sort of visual Proust's tea-dipped madeleine.

This morning I went up to the attic and poked around, looking for a box of my old journals, to see if I'd written anything down about working on the Led Zeppelin movie. Buried in a box marked Tax Records 1980 my husband found this -



One of the reasons I've been reticent about my small part in the movie, outside of family and a few friends, is that I always supposed I had no proof. Only my word and my face. I actually joked to a friend saying, 'It's not like I have a pay stub.' Well, as it turns out, I do.

The box marked 1980 actually has all my old records from the years I worked abroad. My husband brought it down, not to look for anything connected with this, but because I nag him to get rid of old tax records that are not needed. He has now won the argument about tossing stuff without going through it.

This is just blowing my mind.

Air, Fire and Led Zeppelins

Got the front of the fan well underway. It still makes my eyes cross, but I can get there from here.


Made changes to shape and location and transparency of the flames at the top of the book edges in Fire. Moving right along




From time to time I get an email inquiring about a movie I was in back in the seventies, The Song Remains The Same, a documentary/fantasy about the band Led Zeppelin. The other day I got one of those inquiring emails, and I clicked on a link that took me to the fan forum on Led Zepplin.com. There was a thread from June 2011 speculating on her identity - was she English, was she a friend of the band, etc. On pure impulse, I posted this.

An American girl from the south played the part of the princess in the tower. I was working in London as a model and was booked for the job by my agency, Models One. I don't really know why I was cast, but I suspect it was my hair - I did a lot of cosmetics and hair product ads back in the day. I wasn't an actress. Doing editorial pages for English Vogue, Queen and Honey meant more to me in terms of my career.
At the time the shoot was not a big deal to me - just another day of work. Who knew the age of the Internet would extend the movie's shelf life from a couple of years to eternity? My on screen time only lasts a few minutes. It took longer for the hair people to get my straight hair curled with tongs than it did to do the take. I was told to 'look at the camera and don't smile.' Mostly I stood around and tried not to wrinkle the costume.
Post-modeling career, I was a journalist for 20 plus years and have been a fine art painter since 2001. Every now and again someone does a Google search, and emails me from my website, asking if I did the movie.
My kids get a kick out of it. Two of them work in the film business and often the director of photography is familiar with it.
The Song really does Remain the Same in the age of Google and Youtube. Glad you have fond memories of the film.

Turns out these people could not have been nicer.  It's not the kind of topic that comes up in daily life, so it was fun to have somewhere to talk about it. For those who are so inclined, here's a link to the section I'm in, albeit briefly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKsx5bEWnOk

Led Zeppelin - The Song Remains The Same/ Part 6

3:21-3:26, I appear. 3:33-3:36, I look away.  3:39, I look back.  4:21-4:33, I appear behind flames and vanish.

Total: 21 seconds on screen.