Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Egg in Crimson


Oil on canvas on panel, 6" x 6" --  Click here to bid

This is an egg from my pet chicken, Namie, and crumpled wrapping tissue paper. This is my entry for this week's Daily Paintworks Challange which is about doing a painting with crumpled paper. I crunched up so many types and colors of paper, before I settled with this combination. My studio space looked like a classic office scene of a struggling writer with a bunch of typing papers scattered on the floor. I wanted to include an egg (or something other than the paper), and that made things more complicated.

I like how versatile and interesting the tissue paper is when crumpled for still life painting, especially with an egg. It's been always a challenge to paint something round on the flat surface. I've used paper clips, tooth picks, etc. to stabilise the egg in the past. With wrapping tissue paper, I have more control, and make the background more interesting at the same time. I also found it easy to manipulate the composition; I can start painting as I see through viewfinder, and edit the position and size of the folds of paper. That's a great advantage of oil painting.

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