Upping the Scale

The idea of working larger is one which was suggested by one of my tutors. I'd been playing around with scale, mainly using small sizes for the images I worked on but some of these have been from zoomed in sections of a piece of work. I tried doing some very small pieces as well, and I like doing these. However, when the tutor suggested I work on the larger scale last week, it did feel like a reasonable response to the investigations I've been doing. The image below was done in class and I did have a great time on it. It forced me to work differently to make marks. I worked directly from the tube in some areas(which I loved) and in others, used a rag to move the paint around the surface.

The upshot of all this is that I have been struggling with the idea of working even bigger. So, on Friday I went into college to buy large pieces of card A0 and brought them home. The next issue was; what am I going to do with them? This was a trickier problem to solve because space is an issue. But, never phased by a challenge, I decided it was time to rearrange the house a little, so on Saturday, I changed the study around a little to give me a whole wall to play with. I then found some plastic sheeting and pinned that up and taped a piece of card to it.

The scariest thing was being faced with a totally blank piece of A0 card. I didn't have any white emulsion so I primed it with a pale blue. I should have thinned the paint because it was a little laborious putting it on, but it did cover the white well.

Because I liked the orange of one of the original pieces, I wanted to try to recreate that sort of effect. I am aware that if I try to replicate something smaller on a large scale it's going to be difficult to get the same sense of movement without the piece looking too contrived. I'm not sure it will work, but so far I now have the first orange base coat on. I may leave it as it is because it's thin in parts and a little of the pale blue shows through, but I like that.

The discussion I had with my tutor did touch on how I could recreate the different marks and I've switched to a large 3" household painbrush to try to see if I can get the same sense of spontenaity. It will be interesting to see how this turns out.