This is a week off from any themed assignments, and I'm spending it experimenting with new media. I have a ton of artist quality tempera paint in large bottles - it's old but hasn't gone bad yet, so I decided to try something with it.
I had a really great time painting. I set up 18x24 drawing paper on the easel and a small amount of primaries with white/black and had barely started with the paint when I got curious to see how tempera might work.. So I shook up my jars of tempera, poured some right next to the acrylics to see if they’d work... I read online conflicting advice about mixing them, but tried and it seemed fine. I mostly didn’t mix them, just used them separately... the painting quickly became very complicated - both the composition and palette... finally I added some turquoise and immediately it started to dominate and brought some order to all the chaos. What happened that was different was that instead of quitting when I became confused, I kept working thru the confusion and chaos... and the painting suddenly showed some signs of integrity... then with the added touches of dark red, it sort of came together.
It still looks pretty chaotic to me, but I decided to post it because it's something totally new for me - I've never worked this way, or with this much chaos before.