CORNY

I have wanted to paint corn for years and never have been able to get what I wanted. This year I took more photos with the digital camera and finally seem to have gotten the hang of it - although I’m not sure what my neighbors thought when they saw me “up close and personal” with the local corn stalks! Perhaps they thought I was a “stalker”!!
Anyway – as you can see, this is a heck of a lot of lines!

The first step was to enlarge the photo and trace it to the paper with Saral. Then the painting was taped down to a plastic board – which I love! – purchased at either Jerry’s or ASW.

Even though there were lines traced on my watercolor paper, they had to make sense to me, so I found it best to utilize a viewfinder which I made (upper left side of photo) to go over the photo (like a grid). I carefully checked out the lines which had been traced – some lines were erased, some added – until I felt comfortable with the image. This was a process! I could only do a small area, about a half hour at a time, so it took several hours over the course of a few days. Then I let it sit upright on my drawing table so I could check it out periodically. When I was finally convinced it looked like corn (!) to me, I began the painting process.

PS:  I'll be out of town a few days and won't post again until next week - I know you will miss me!  I will try to check in from time to time, tho (gotta get my "blog fix"!)
TIP! When I use Saral, sometimes I get a lot of graphite on the paper - if I leave it on the paper it will mix in with the paint and make it look gray-ish. My solution is, after retracing all lines with a pencil, to put my paper in the stationery tub and use a sprayer - that extra graphite goes down the drain before I begin painting.  This also gives me a wet surface to begin pouring or dripping paint - then I let it sit overnight to dry and all the "peaks and valleys" flatten out, leaving a relatively smooth surface (my own version of stretching paper).