Gloria J Zucaro's "Paula, Basquiat and Me"

Our mixed-media artist instructor with Creative Jumpstart 2016 led by Nathalie Kalbach for January 10 was Paula Phillips. She showed different methods of layering.  The one I had never tried before was to layer several colors, and put in words or areas with a white oil pastel. Cover that with a thin layer of acrylic paint.  Then use your heat gun or hair dryer to melt the oil pastel layer.  Wipe away with a baby wipe and you will see the first layers underneath.  So cool.

Paula had a "stack of books" stencil which I did not have, so I looked through my stash to see what I had that I might use.  I found a couple of text stamps, and a Tiki mask stamp.  The Tiki mask stamp just had that Basquiat "feel" to me, so I stamped it in several places and then used the design as my focal point. Basquiat also sometimes used large hands in his paintings. They reminded me of Mickey Mouse glove hands, so I added those to my stick figure body. The final and steps are below. I used acrylic paints, Sharpie markers, Golden Gesso and some stamps with a Ranger ink pad. I also drew in words, crowns and scribbles with a Scripto ink pen # 08.

text and bits of magazines, stenciled on paint, matte medium

more paint pressed on with paper towel

stamping

add oil pastel words(tomorrow, ok) and Tiki basic lines for head, add acrylic paint layer, melt off oil pastel to see underneath.

outline Tiki head and the word "tomorrow" in marker

go over page with gesso, wipe some off

Add body, hands and text.  Outline with black and white, fill in some areas with red and black marker.