The Story on the Edge of a Print

Joni Mitchell talked about how she alternated songwriting and painting. She called it crop rotation. Sometimes a field needs to lay fallow for a bit, planted with a cover crop. You cultivate a new area. The old field is still there, it's waiting, receiving nutrients for the next planting. 

I've been finding joy in layering color using gel plates. The above image is a technique experiment in pulling permanent magic marker from a gel plate using a layer of acrylic paint. There was no attempt at composition. It was a fast layering of color. I didn't focus on registering the layers together on the paper. Because of that, you get surprises at the edges of the print. It tells the story of the print. Below is an extreme closeup of a very tiny detail. At the edges, I see things to use in larger ways, on purpose, with planning. But that's a future post.