Contours

I was tempted to run some fancy find and replace function to delete all the rouge Â’s that have peppered my blog since the WordPress upgrade, but through some unforseen technical glitch I probably would have deleted all the real A’s too, turning my website into “The rtwork of Shwn Flchetti”.  Since I don’t want to be an ‘rtist’, I decided just to safely (and maddeningly) delete them one by one.  Ah, now back to some rtwork.

I’ve developed a Pavlonian twitch every time I see the alert on my blog “A new version of WordPress is available, click here to upgrade”, since every previous upgrade has resulted in a subsequent “Woes of the Web” post, usually after a week of banging my head against the keyboard in frustration as I tried to figure out where exactly all of my posts had gone, what a “fatal error in line 62″ was, and how on earth to undo it all.

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I’ve submitted Opaline Dreams as my entry for this year’s CPSA national show, the 18th Annual International Exhibition.  I’ll know whether or not it’s been accepted at the end of April.

Opaline Dreams was interesting in that it was my first attempt at mixing Prismacolors with Neocolor IIs, which are water soluable.  Neocolors look much like a Crayola crayon when you hold them (although they are still considered a colored pencil – imagine the ‘lead’ of a colored pencil wrapped in paper, instead of wood).  It takes a bit of experimenting on a test scrap of paper to determine the right combination of crayons to achieve your color, especially since, once you wet them, the color will be very intense.  For this piece, I intended to use the Neocolors only for the darks; this was because I really felt the gray green color of the Colourfix paper was a key part of the skin tones and fabric, and wanted it to show through in the lights.  Since Colourfix can be difficult to get a full range of values on, having solid darks on a lighter paper also helped address this.

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20″ x 12″ Prismacolor colored pencil and Neocolor II on Fresh Gray Colourfix paper.  Completed 2010.