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©2011 Julia Forsyth, ANDREW JACKSON'S DIGITAL HOLIDAYS, 8 1/2" x 11", Original drawing colorized through Microsoft Paint
Since drawing in a Blind Contour style naturally leaves lots of spaces connected by lines, it lends itself to color. I actually thought I would save time over "Old Skool paint and paintbrushes" if I imported my #Draw365.38 drawing (www.flickr.com/photos/juliaforsythart/5451382802/in/photo...) into the Paint program loaded onto most PC's and used the icon that looks like it's painting in the fastest way possible - dumping a whole bucket of paint out at one time.
So I loaded my drawing into Paint and started what I thought would take 30 minutes tops. Surprise, surprise...4 hours into it, I was laughing non-humorously at myself and my gross underestimation. I could have done a front-and-back drawing of $10 and $5 in the time it took me to work on this!
Surprise, surprise - indeed. One surprise was that the dumped color came out all "dry-brush" looking. I remember my watercolor professor telling us that it's called a holiday when you make a watercolor brushstroke on your paper but just a few tiny resistant white dots of the textured watercolor paper don't get colored.
Another surprise was that somehow, once my drawing got loaded into Paint, the black lines from the original drawing lightened to a dull gray. Bright colors from paint (in Paint) made the lines look even duller, so I had to retrace most of them painstakingly (hello tedium!) with a black Paint-created line. If you've drawn a Bind Contour Drawing lately, you know that there are a TON of lines. I got really bored really fast doing careful retracing, so I compromised and left some of the lines gray. (Official Party Line here: It's to add greater contrast between the black and the gray lines.)
This reminded me that there are certain nuances that just don't translate as well in a computer drawing. I miss the brushstrokes. I know that there's a way to have some simulated brushstrokes, but even so, it's just not the same.
LIke any good experiment, instead of simply answering things and calling it a day, this experiment fed my mind more ideas that I never would have had without stretching a little bit creatively. This experiment made me curious about 2 future experiments: how a Blind Contour Drawing would look drawn ever-so-lightly in pencil, then watercolored, then adding the black lines back in with thin watercolor strokes. 2nd experiment: make a Blind Contour Drawing on a canvas using an acrylic graffiti paint pen that's formulated to have those cool runny paint rivulets from the drawn strokes. Then unleash the color on it with acrylic paint.
Admittedly, those ideas that came from this experiment are about as different in creative approaches as both of my kids are in their approaches to just about everything (EXTREMELY!), but in my mind's eye they would both be very successful using their own strengths.
I'll see how reality matches up with a project completed only in my mind's eye. ;) Watercolor VS. an almost grafitti-like grittiness to acrylic painting approach - don't change that dial.
(And of course, regular acrylic/oil want to get in on the action too. Also, who could resist when aluminum foil asks so convincingly to join in? Aluminum foil punctuation is so DAMN hard to resist - you try it! Luckily, there's room for all of them in THIS inn...c'mon over!)
Holidays, anyone? Why yes - I'll take a whole project of 'em.