A lovely commission

The Easter weekend was a good time for getting things done. In Sunday's post I wrote about getting the letterpress commission almost done; and today I can report that the second commission got finished as well.

Here are the leftovers - almost more beautiful than the finished piece for my mind.

Not sure why, but I imagined the calligraphy in silver. So I tried the FineTecs and I tried gouache and for whatever reason, they just wouldn't work. Maybe it was the paper; maybe it was the nib; maybe it was the weather, but some days it just doesn't flow and you think - oh oh...now what?

I wondered about straight black sumi ink, but then I mixed up some pale green gouache and felt like I was edging closer to a resolution. Ignore the wobbles in the letters!

I conferred with Barry who asked if I had any green ink. I did, and had basically not even considered it so I did a test or two and thought...well maybe!

I had to do a logo as well and tested out my watercolour pencils to see if I could get close enough to the logo colours. This was quite tough given it was Easter, shops were closed and it had to go the framers on Tuesday morning. It was a real quick commission let me say, and I was working within constraints!

I actually ended up mixing a bunch of gouache to create the colours matches as best I could, after a few trials with the pencils.

Strangely enough I nearly always try to work on two pieces at a time, in case I fall apart and ruin something on one of them.  So I prepared two 'finals' and then had to decide between a dark grey backing for LOVE or a metallic silver backing for LOVE.

Choices, choices, do they ever end?

I took the final to the framer this morning and fingers crossed all shall be well and the work will be winging its way to Melbourne next week for its important date!