Sanding isn’t the answer

The story of the mystical dike continues. Today Wim Kol and I tried to distress the clouds, but it wasn’t as easy a we thought it would be…

Our plan was to scratch up the blue clouds with some rough sanding paper. But the quality of the acrylic paint – which had now dried for a week – and the canvas was such, that it was very hard to really distress the clouds. We had to sand a lot to get the clouds a bit lighter and make them more uneven.

Unfortunately, with the sanding we were creating unwanted lines where the sandpaper touched the wooden frame. Ugh. So we decided that sanding wasn’t the answer. We ended up making white marks in the sky with a palette knife. Now the clouds are still too dominant, relative to the little dike temple. But we plan to put another layer of yellow and green over the sky, further dampening those clouds. In our sketch model that worked very well.

But of course we are really looking forward to the last stage where we print the final black lines over all those acrylics. And again we have to put the printing off, because now first the white marks have to dry and then the next sky layer needs to dry after that.

Sigh. One day we will finish this work!