I suspect I had been procrastinating in a way, and was a little bit afraid to take the next step and get wax on my "pigment and pastel" underpainting. I had somehow envisioned to cover the whole panel with a couple of coats of medium. I knew the wax was going to darken and enrich the colors, but didn't know exactly how each pigment would react, having notice in previous tests that some light colored pigments like Ultramarine Red and Violet darken considerably, while others don't change a whole lot. I was therefore curious to see the effect the wax would have on the colors, and only covered a small corner of the panel which I considered sort of "finished".
I applied the medium with a 2" brush in short strokes, rather than using smooth long strokes of my extra wide 6" Hake brush. The reason was that I had notices that long strokes sometimes tended to drag darker pigment particles and create unwanted lines. The surface ended up rather messy looking, with heavy cross brush texture and drips. After it cooled, I went back and filled in the low areas and small places I had missed, which made it look even worse.
But it actually doesn't matter, because I scraped the extra medium off, and began to even out the layer, cutting down the high spots, and sometimes even filling out pits with the shavings. The scraping also polishes the surface, and removes the milkiness of the wax, enhancing the colors. I didn't try to get a smooth finish, the idea was to somewhat even the thickness of the wax, and see the underpainting better.
The next step was to sprinkle small amounts of pigments of various contrasting colors(yellow, red ochre, dark red, orange, purple, green, caput mortum) on the surface, trying to place green specks over purplish areas, yellow over reddish areas, orange over greenish areas, etc...
The layer was completely fused, and refused again in areas where the dry pigment had not been absorbed. The effect was to create both specks and swirls, that I tried to control as best I could with the direction of the hot air blower. But there is a large part of chance that cannot be controlled, and one has to hope for "Happy Accidents". Things looked pretty good, though I am not sure the sprinkling was such a great idea... But since I stated that way, I will have to finish the whole panel the same way. When I got about half the panel covered in medium, I could not resist putting some of the images on top to judge the effect:
I applied the medium with a 2" brush in short strokes, rather than using smooth long strokes of my extra wide 6" Hake brush. The reason was that I had notices that long strokes sometimes tended to drag darker pigment particles and create unwanted lines. The surface ended up rather messy looking, with heavy cross brush texture and drips. After it cooled, I went back and filled in the low areas and small places I had missed, which made it look even worse.
But it actually doesn't matter, because I scraped the extra medium off, and began to even out the layer, cutting down the high spots, and sometimes even filling out pits with the shavings. The scraping also polishes the surface, and removes the milkiness of the wax, enhancing the colors. I didn't try to get a smooth finish, the idea was to somewhat even the thickness of the wax, and see the underpainting better.
The next step was to sprinkle small amounts of pigments of various contrasting colors(yellow, red ochre, dark red, orange, purple, green, caput mortum) on the surface, trying to place green specks over purplish areas, yellow over reddish areas, orange over greenish areas, etc...
The layer was completely fused, and refused again in areas where the dry pigment had not been absorbed. The effect was to create both specks and swirls, that I tried to control as best I could with the direction of the hot air blower. But there is a large part of chance that cannot be controlled, and one has to hope for "Happy Accidents". Things looked pretty good, though I am not sure the sprinkling was such a great idea... But since I stated that way, I will have to finish the whole panel the same way. When I got about half the panel covered in medium, I could not resist putting some of the images on top to judge the effect:
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