GENERATE FORM LIKE A BYZANTINE

A mantra of Transparent Drawing is Draw Like A Byzantine. And the Byzantines used a lot of gold leaf. I don’t know about you, but my personal stash of gold leaf seems to be out. To compensate for that, I used Gold Metallic Spray Paint. And when you use that, things get Byzantine real quick.

This is not the first time that I have included a spray paint assembly. I have been using various spray paints on an off in the past few months. There is a definite flatness to the tone that spray paints provide. And this flatness can be at odds with Form Generation. Still, the transparency can be controlled via the quantity of paint that you apply.

For the drawing above, I first assembled a Form Combine. I drew from two Source Images. One was a Beaux Arts arch and dome photo that I took in Chicago. The other was from Haeckel. I then applied a blue acrylic ink tone, as the Byzantines were big on the use of blue. Did you know that, after gold, ultramarine was the most expensive pigment used in paintings?

Next, I applied a layer of matte black spray paint, using various masks with painter’s tape. The masks were applied in response to the Form Combine. I then removed all of that tape, and did two mask / metallic gold layers. Subsequent assemblies then included black acrylic ink stick, fluorescent pink acrylic ink, water soluble pencil applied wet, and white mechanical pen.

And while I was doing all of the above, I kept looking at Byzantine works, which were mostly of the head of Christ. I kept pushing myself to really, really, Draw Like a Byzantine. I kept trying to respond to the basic geometry of the compositions. Dark where there was dark. Gold paint where there was gold leaf. And, hey, if I want to use pink fluorescent paint, then I did. I submit that if the Byzantines had pink fluorescent paint as a precious pigment, they would have used that also.

Gold metallic spray paints are not created equal. Ace has 17 different versions of this. I realized that I had a half used can of it in the basement. It’s amazing the supplies that lurk in the basement storage cabinets.

Did I generate a holistic form? No, this instead is a Drawing At The Boundary Of Form. Still, I generated additional sketches based on this drawing, and I was able to move very close to a resolved holistic form.

What matters is that this was fun. I worked with my hands. I interacted with physical objects, such as tape, the x-acto to cut the tape, etc. I felt the pull of the tape as I removed it from the paper. This is an analogue drawing. I drew in a way that I have never done before. And you will never, never get that level of tangible reflection, that analogue luster, from any digital device.