Tom Wagen's Art

I used the same process for these as I did for the fish abstraction that I did yesterday - except instead of drawing directly on the piece of palette paper, I took a picture of the palette paper that I had splattered with paint and ink - and then, using software on my computer, I did some contour drawings of faces that I saw in the patterns created by the splattered paint and ink

I wanted to do something that had me thinking outside of the box.  So I took a sheet of palette paper which what I used when I set up my oil painting palette - I applied acrylic paint and ink in a random pattern on the palette paper and let it dry - then did something similar to the Rochart Test - I left the paper aside for a day - then this morning, glance at it and decided what the first thing I saw in it - and it was, for me, bubbles, water and a fish.

This is the ink drawing of milkweed that I did yesterday.   The story behind this copy is as follows: - Before I did the milkweed drawing in ink, yesterday - I used the same sheet of paper to attempt an ink drawing - it could be described as a draft in preparation for doing the final drawing that I posted yesterday - When I was sitting at my desk with the final picture propped up under a lamp on my desk, I noticed that the draft on the reverse side of the paper showed thru the paper and presented an image under an image - I decided to put the Milkweed ink drawing in a floating frame and see what it would look like with the back lighting provided the lamp - After doing this, I thought, it gave the original more depth and made it more interesting

The buildings on the Southern Caribbean Island of Curacao are all painted with bright colors - the legend is that when the Dutch settled on the island - all the buildings were painted bright white - residents were experiencing a epidemic of headaches - one of the local doctors said to the island's mayor that the headaches were because of the white buildings reflecting the intense sunlight - the doctor suggested that all the buildings on the island be painted something other than white - and so it was done - and by the way, the doctor who made this suggestion was also part owner in a paint factory on the island

This was an experiment in a technique that I saw on line.  I used a mixture of water and vinegar to get the impressions of the petals (for this flower fantasy - then applied watercolor pencil to give the petals some depth)

Using software on my computer, I converted a oil pastel that I had completed a couple of years ago, into a line drawing.  I then printed the line drawing on vellum and applied opalscent ink to the back to the vellum.  Finally, I posted a previously done block print of the same scene behind the vellum; and mounted the whole thing in a floating frame,