Harvest Moon - Work in Progress

Charlotte Wensley
Jan 30, 2023
2 min read

Updated: May 22

I took a quick break from my bigger paintings last week and had a go with using gessoed mixed media paper as a substrate for this sketch. There's something lovely about painted paper - maybe it's the way the paint goes on, or the way it sits when it's on there...not sure. But I have a thing for it!

The added bonus of gessoing the paper first is that it's less likely to buckle when it gets loaded with paint and collage pieces. Watery paint also glides beautifully over the gesso and settles into any ridges and brush marks that I've made where I've applied the gesso, adding to the visual texture.

I thought I might go with purple and blue for this one, but my sketches always seem to have a mind of their own! And as you'll see this one wandered off.....

Having a look through some recent prints I came across rich golden yellow I'd used at some stage with a stencil and the colour vibrations went up a notch when added to the blue! I also had some snippets from my black and white collage work lying on the table, so bits of those made their way into this one too.