PROTOA Variant 𝛼 WIP 20210827 ©2021
I’m finally painting the first Protoa variant. I wanted a highly saturated yellow green, but the local art stores were out of this hue in Golden brand acrylics (my preferred paint). When I spoke with the sales clerk at Van Beek, he told me they’d been having supply problems with Golden lately: no yellow ochre for months! Golden must be having some real challenges if they can’t ship yellow ochre. In any case, the only acrylic brand they carried with a green that felt vibrant enough for what I wanted was Amsterdam Expert. When I asked the clerk how this paint was, he tried (gently) to steer me away, saying that it had more pigment than the other grades of Amsterdam acrylics, but otherwise would work as the brand usually does. He suggested I could mix my color, but to no avail. I decided that between its inexpensive price and high intensity color, I’d try it out. Well, in spite of its name, this paint was not expert grade. I chose not to mix my color because I’ve found that if you want a highly vibrant color, mixing often leads to dullness, so for good saturation it’s often better to paint straight from the tube. In any case, even the cheap Daler-Rowney I’ve purchased at Walmart for kid’s craft art has more consistency than the Amsterdam Expert. I was surprised at how bad it was. The green pigment separated radically from the medium, leaving green splotches over a bright yellow base suspension. If I’d been painting anything else, I’d have been sorely disappointed.
Fortunately, in this Protoa series, accidents are part of the process, so I went with it (though there will be no future purchases of Amsterdam Expert). One of the interesting effects of the pigment separation was the way it played with the surface texture. It added unexpected depth. In a way, this was more interesting than the consistent Golden heavy body Hansa Yellow used on the top. This color has some transparency, which offered decent blending at the edges of the Amsterdam Expert Yellow Green. For the next layer, I’m going to mix a little Golden Pthalo Green Fluid acrylic into the Amsterdam yellow green for a slightly deeper shade as an accent on the base edge. We’ll see how that mixing goes.
In addition to the Protoa, I continued my tapered spiral earring project. I’ve been hand forging 3mm round sterling wire, and may have gone too far. I tried to speed things up by using a flat rolling mill, but in attempting to go faster, I don’t think I annealed enough between presses. In any case, pure hand forging would have produced better results because you can avoid making corners. In trying to avoid a squared outcome on the mill, the corners squished into thin flaps: essentially making burs. I could continue and work the ends into mokume since the wire surface now has a fold, but that’s not what I want. I probably have to cut off the tips, which are now thin and brittle, unless they can be repaired with heat. Since I’ll have to cut off the ends if it doesn’t work, I’ll try repairing the cracks first. I wanted to avoid soldering on earwire but this may be unrealistic.
Forging Tapered wire part 1 WIP 20210826 ©2021
Forging Tapered wire part 2 WIP 20210826