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posted on Jan, 17 2024 @ 04:42 PM
All the winter photos I have seen over this season led me to want to see how many of those cold cold mountain and river colors I could work into some
of my own art.
Any here who have seen some of my other pieces may recall that I work mainly with symmetric mandalas. For most of my art I place the mandala itself
within a frame such as this one here. Some not but mostly.
This frame was originally a photo I took of a fresco on a building. Once I started working on the photo I used a drawing tool called a clone brush.
This brush can copy any part of an image and repeat it somewhere else. It's not just a matter of copying but more it is a matter of adjusting the
entire frame so that the repeating swoops and swirls fit together before the next set begins.
Once I have tinted an area I can copy it to another layer and then tint that layer accordingly. Then using that clone tool I trace the modified tint
to aspects of the original. Around the edge of the frame are little figures and repeated knobs and bumps that are called gadrooning if one were
working in carving wood.
The center of this piece, as usual, can be found two major aspects of the mandala. One is an endless labyrinth, a pathway that runs up and down and
all the way around the mandala until it reaches the point it began. The other major aspect of this piece is that the labyrinth is run through another
pathway. This pathway begins anywhere along the outside of the labyrinth and splits itself into tributaries that continue on until they reach their
ends. In this piece those ends can be noticed by the little white balls I have placed at their endings.
The colors here were difficult for me because to keep with the theme of a cold river, everything had to be done in bluish and whiteish while at the
same time maintaining the continuity of the labyrinth and mazes. The dark blues could not be two dark as they would lose the paths they defined and
not to white as the whites would be overwhelming.
Mostly I work only one eighth of a canvas. Everything must be repeatable, that is it must fit perfectly with an exact copy of itself. Once I finish
one eighth, I rotate it and flip it and put them together to make one quarter. Each side must match the other side otherwise it will not all fit. Then
one quarter is copied and pasted, rotated and flipped and fit to the first quarter and so on. That part is simple and fast. It takes about two
minutes. The first one eighth of the piece usually takes somewhere in the order of fifty to sixty hours.
Sometimes it is only in that final two minutes that I can see if what I wanted to accomplish has been successful. In this case I think it is.