The main body of Ernt's forest works are often juxaposed against these pure white "suns" and "moons" with a hole in the middle, so I just wanted to add that element. I was having trouble free handing such a precice shape so I created two cicle guides with painters tape , put them down on the canvas and painted over them
with my first layer of the forest I wanted to create a solid foundation in order to highlight both the texture and the color of the subject. So I mixed burnt umber into black paint in order to give the forest a very dark backdrop while not quite exactly being pure black. Max Ernsts technique of grattage so I wanted my base layer not to just serve as an outline, but serve as an elevated surafce above the rest of the canvass upon which I could start building layers and layers of texture |
Most of ernsts paintings, or at least the ones he used his grattage technique on, were painted primarily with a pallate knife, So i sort of wanted to replicate that, however I dont own a pallate knife, so instead I used a plastic butter knife. the knife provided me with three main options when it came to laying the paint down, first of all the flat face would alow me to smootly glob down paint across the canvas while ridges on the cutty end provided me with the main scource of texture when I dragged them across the painrt
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