Medium and technique experiments

Alongside painting Gehenna, which is my final major project/ piece, it is important to me that I conduct several ongoing experiments concerning the techniques and mediums I'm using within my final piece. This entails taking risks with paint, masking, palette choices and more on a smaller scale with several variables at play, to deduce which techniques produce the best results, before committing to 'Gehenna', which I consider to be a high pressure painting.

Carrying out these smaller scale, low pressure experiments allows me to fail inconsequentially and stumble upon serendipitous happy accidents that I can later capitalise upon in 'Gehenna' once I have fine tuned the technique and become familiar with it, allowing me to feel more relaxed and confident while working on the piece. The first experiment I carried out was a paint pour technique. I wanted to familiarise myself with as many different techniques as possible before committing to the bigger piece so I knew which to choose for the best looking results. In this experiment, I used a method that entails pressing a flat surface against the paint pour (while wet) and peeling it away. This produces an effect that resembles ink splodge test patterns but with a much more saturated and diverse palette.

 This method works well as it is a transferable skill to use on 'Gehenna', I am aware that many of the paint pour techniques I have used in the past aren't doable on 'Gehenna' due to the sheer scale of the piece and because of the surface it's created on (paper). I have made a series of paint pours in the past that involve spinning the canvas I'm doing the paint pour on, on a hand made bike wheel mechanism. This creates fantastic effects and I'd love to have these featured in 'Gehenna' but I am yet to find a way to spin a board as big and heavy as the one I'm working on. Because of this, it is important for me to experiment with several other paint pour effects before deciding on one to incorporate within the piece.



In addition to conducting paint pour experiments, I also wanted to hone in on tightening up my making skills, as this is something I'll need to be familiar and comfortable with in 'Gehenna'. The plans I have for 'Gehenna' mean I'll need to be able to mask large specific areas of the piece to protect them from being ruined by pigment meant for other areas, processes like paint pours in particular can be incredibly messy so this is a vital skill to have if I want to honour the vision I have for the painting. To ensure I was practising how to improve my masking, I tried masking a large area of a scrap of paper I had from a previous paint pour I had made. Because the piece already featured paint pour patterns, I decided to paint a gradient background in the areas that hadn't been masked off, as painting smooth clean seamless gradients is something I also wanted to incorporate in 'Gehenna' to honour the thumbnail, meaning this experiment was beneficial in more than one area. The results from the experiment were successful in both areas, I managed to blend the two background colours into a gradient and the masking from successfully protected the brush strokes from the gradient impacting the paint pour.