Theme 8 (Industrial)

My first thought was "chrome": some black spray paint, a stencil and maybe a wash or two of acrylic. I wanted to capture the metal-machinery that lies in the void between clean silicon technology and the steampunk of our dreams.

I started with the spray paint, but never really developed a stencil. I had the acrylic, but was too lazy to find it. Instead, I found myself painting with chunks of watercolor on top of black spray paint and alternating between the two mediums. I probably inhaled too much of the spray paint, because I ended up going figurative rather than abstract, and the palette was more cyborg than chrome.

This ultimately turned into more of a reinterpretation of nature in the modern age rather than an expression of 'chrome'. She's fractured, but still present. Some of her is still flesh, but some of it has been eaten up, fallen apart, abandoned.

Here she is, our mechanical mother nature:

Mechanical 16x20

The texture that I got laying the watercolor over the spray paint was fascinating, though it started to crack as it dried. I put gloss medium on it today to both seal the painting and to varnish it, giving it a glazed, chrome-like surface.