Stage 3 - pulling tape & making decisions

i took the tape off the areas I’d preserved for the tree background this morning.  Having looked through a lot of work I’d done in a printmaking class, I’ve been struggling with my ideas for the landscape portion. I had thought to go deep and dark, into the forest with very little contrast to emphasize the night.   But looking at the sky, there really isn’t a place for all the Celtic influences I had intended to include. I think the sky is almost there, I just need to work on the highlights of the Aurora. I don’t want to crowd the sky with imagery. The Aurora is coming along beautifully. 

I was really worried about the balance when I had the tape on, but as soon as I removed it, the sky popped against the beautiful darkness of the landscape.  Now the question is, do I want to go with my original intent of the huge pines on either side, or do I want to leave the right side as a group of mountains.  As soon as the tape was removed, I saw these amazing, fantasy style mountains rising. The two trees on the left are still just trees in my mind’s eye, but the right could be either, and the edges are just so crisp and beautiful against the skyline.

I’m going to have to make a decision soon, but today, the job is just to lay in background darks for the landscape. I’m going to use dark browns and greens for this.

For the Aurora I used viridian, sap green, touches of Prussian blue and phthalo blue, mixed with a little white. It still needs highlights and I may incorporate some pinks and blue up some areas of it on the next layer.  I need to clean up the interior sweep of the swirl and some of the sky below the swirl. I rubbed off some mistakes and I seem to have gone down to the gesso, which is showing too much.

So … mountains or trees? Trees keep it more realistic, the style of the mountains would certainly be more fantasy, just because of the spiked shapes.  The Dragon’s Teeth would be a good name for them.   I think the darkness is going to be overlaid with a variety of Celtic patterns, and perhaps a silhouette of Stone Henge at the bottom.  Ancient nature, ancient man in combination. 

I will probably do cutwork on freezer paper to do the Celtic work, which is hugely time consuming, but I’ve done it for screen printing. If I could print on it, I’d do a block print of the patterns, but I can’t use a press or screen print with the frame in the way. I think the cutwork would be the best way to get the basic patterns in place and work from there.