Art Research
Them Bones, Them Bones - Them DRY bones …
(Science is FUN !!)
2023-09-25
I have been working on an image involving a half buried skull and skeletal hand raising out of the beach on King William Island (an image from Stan Roger’s North West Passage) and I have not been happy with the colour of the bones I’ve been painting.
Test swatches
In an effort to keep it simple I used just Zinc White as a base and tried tinting it with only 1 other colour to see if I could get the ivory white of bleached bones or the brownish tone of weathered bones. None of these really suit, (although Zinc White with Cad Yellow (deep), Cad Red Dark, or Daniel Smith’s Quinacreidone Burnt Orange are pretty good skin tones - Have to investigate that further).
I asked my better half which one she liked She liked and she picked the Yellow Ocher tint best. She also pointed out we had a collection of bones one of our daughters accumulated for a possible art project so why not look at them.
So - that sounded fun.
so - we’ll set up an aged buried bone and a sun bleached bone in a jar of household bleach to see what happens to their colour and then use that for a basis to work on. In the meantime I will use a very lean coat of Zinc White as a placeholder and undercoat in the study piece until I can apply the results of this experiment.
2023-12-06
Well educational, this experiment was not particularly helpful. Different aging conditions and compounds can generate just about any colour . Sun/salt bleech is a grey tinted white. Bones that have been buried in Red River gumbo for a while (2 or 3 seasons) are an earthy brown tone. So you basically wing it based on the story you are telling
202402
Started another test series about toned paper. Ihave several sheets of toned paper and I am doing the same image using 4 different media to compare how they look and how well I can use them
