Road Trip - Sheep (on green ground)

Sheep (on green ground)   charcoal, watercolor and relief ink on paper   10.75 x 15

Road trips take one off of the beaten path and add discovery and excitement to our lives.  Every so often, I feel the need to enlighten my studio experience.  For some time, I had been craving a drawing experience, as most of my time is spent painting, a more complex experience.  Charcoal conte pencils were used to render the sheep on a sheet of unknown paper (when will I learn to be a better labeler?).  Watercolor was added here and there, as was a sprinkling of powdered charcoal and some blasts of water spray from a bottle.  No method to my madness at all.  Just a trusting of design elements and my hard-won experience of failure and success at creating images that hold my interest and express my personal sense of visual aesthetic.  Relief ink was printed on top...that being the most unreliable of the processes.  Water, pressure and placement are all unreliable variables.  I am thrilled by the layering of pigments and yet, at the same time, am striving for simpler shapes...a combining, of sorts, of traditional realism with a more modern simplicity, where details are highly edited and discarded.

I am pleased.  Road trip....yeah!