Donation continued/Phase 8
Phase 8 -- step 1
And now for something different.
The painting was now too busy -- where was your eye supposed to go? The part I felt most strongly about was the orange "lattice" that stretched down each set of panels. That needed to be protected. Everything else could go away. Perhaps multiple washes of blue would make everything else recede and the orange would pop. Perhaps even going so far as to paint solid blue everything that wasn't part of the orange lattice. Perhaps all of my correcting the sponge marks was pointless since I was going to paint over it anyway.
I got out my trusty masking tape -- the blue kind this time -- and divided the area I wanted to protect from the area I wanted to paint over. I liked the blue tape -- would my final choice be that blue? And how would I achieve that look? I've had problems with tone all along. It would have to be a dark blue color. Did that mean the hue would be dark or the tone would be dark? Was I adding black to one of the blues I'd already used. I started to worry about going dark. I'd done that with the sponge marks with little success. Perhaps I should go light -- then I could always add more glazes to make things darker. It would be easier than going the other way.
Phase 8 -- step 2
But that much solid light blue -- or dark for that matter -- the orange lattice would certainly stand out. The thought entered my mind that I might want to do a blue "lattice" in those areas instead of something solid. That would tie the orange into the blue and all of the underpainting wouldn't have been for nothing. A few hours of worry and I decided to go ahead with the lattice plan, but the patches of blue, green, orange, and yellow seemed too bright. I suspected they would pull focus away from the orange lattice and I wouldn't have solved my busy-ness problem. I decided to glaze over the areas I was about to lattice blue. More masking tape and odd trapezoids of orange glaze.
The effect worked to tone down the yellow, green and teal. It was subtle but I thought it was necessary.
Phase 8 -- step 3
The next step was to tape in all the negative space for the blue lattice.