lesson4

For this lesson I will use almost all Art Impressions stamps. In their catalog, the folks at A.I. recommend working from the background, forward. Their stamps are designed to work well together in this way, with no masking required.

I started here with the barn, leaving room in the foreground for the rest of the scene. Before I did anything else, I followed some excellent advice I was given by Joan Wear: I made a photocopy of my scene.

In my first attempt, I added the mailbox image on the right, and the large rock on the left (A). The more I looked at it, the more unhappy I was with the way I had placed my foreground elements. They seemed to be floating away from the main image (the barn). Thank goodness for my photocopy (well, okay, I could have easily stamped that barn again. But it sure was nice that I didn't have to drag out that stamp again from the bottom of the stack of boxes of stamps).

In my second attempt (B), using the photocopy, I got out my stamp positioner and decided exactly where I wanted that mailbox to be in relation to the barn. I wanted it to be quite close in, to make the scene hang together better, and not look like there were huge empty gaps between the main elements of my scene. I also moved the rock image a bit more towards the middle of the page (or in other words, more towards the background). I then added the birds, because I thought the scene still looked a bit skimpy.

I then added some dirt texture (Beeswax) and began coloring. I still felt unhappy with the scene, but I decided to see if it would look better to me once it was colored.

I used Marvy Le Plume markers and blending pen, watercolor pencils and blending pen, and chalk to color the scene.

I added the fall leaves last, coloring on the leaf stamp with Marvy Brush markers (red and light brown).

Even once the coloring was finished, I wasn't satisfied with the scene (though it does look alot better colored in). There are two things that really bother me: the large rock on the left looks out of place to me (it's too big, for one thing, and it's just stuck there in the middle of nothing) and the barn looks ready to fall off the horizon. Now, how can I fix these problems?

Here is the second version of the scene. Aside from using a different rock stamp on the left, I stamped additional wild grass, added the trio of girls, and stamped only two of the three birds used in the first version. I also raised the horizon a bit, stamped some grass onto the green areas, and changed some of the colors.

I colored this version of the scene with colored pencils and chalks.