Making Friends with Abstract

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been busy working on another piece inspired by a pic taken by Leisa Rich. I know — I haven’t finished the last one — but I wanted something to work on when I handed the other piece off to her. I don’t like to have more than one project open at a time — but in working collaboratively, it just happened.

This one is much bigger — it’s about 42″ wide by 36″ high.

I didn’t take a ton of in process pics. It just doesn’t make as much sense as it does when working in pictorial. I tried to take pics for each color group, but I ran into a problem with that. This piece was pinned on my drafting table with the ironing pad. I pinned it there so it wouldn’t shift around. I couldn’t construct this piece in sections — the entire piece had to fit together like a puzzle. However, it’s so large, if I stood on a chair and took a picture of the top, I couldn’t get the entire piece in the frame and everything would be skewed. Therefore, I took a lot of pics, many of which were terrible — and I got to be friends with the Delete All option on my camera. Unfortunately, in doing that, I inadvertently deleted an all yellow and all red pic that I had taken and planned to use. C’est la vie.

That yellow with the pink is really horrid. I think that this was the worst stage — with all the hot colors and none of the cool colors (there was a little bit of purple and green but not enough to balance the hot).

Then I started adding the blues. It made a world of difference. Adding the cold colors gave life to the hot colors. I also needed the intensity of a deeper value. That comes in the dark blue — and then ultimately in the black.

I took this picture while it was tilted on the table. For the previous picture, I had unpinned it from the table and set it vertically on the design wall for a good pic. Unfortunately, it shifted everything around in my puzzle — so I wasn’t going to do that again until the end.

And here is the final pic of the top — vertical on the design wall — with all of that deep black.

I am very fond of this piece. I am using the skills that I learned in making pictorials but applying them to abstract design.