I love the colors red and yellow together. As a kid, I used to pull out the yellow and red M&Ms and make a little pile of them off to the side. I'd then greedily eat all the other colors while saving the yellow-red pile for as long as I could.
I have always wanted my bedroom walls to be painted in bright yellow and the door a bright red. (And I will someday. I just haven't found the right house to do it in yet.)
Back in Minnesota, every year I grew a wildflower bed that included yellow and red Japanese poppies.
Red and yellow beet ravioli? Yes, please.
Sadly one of the hardest colors to achieve in marbling is a pure, robust red. It has to do with the pigments that make up the color, which do not do well when diluted nor when spread across the top of the bath. However, there are two ways to work around this. The first is to marble on red paper. While this is an effective technique, it 1) sort of feels like cheating, and 2) makes it very difficult to spot color ~ that is, place your color exactly where you want it to be and no where else.
The second way around the red challenge is to compress the paint in the bath so much, it has no choice to be red. And that's what I did with this piece.
Untitled 383 is one of several pieces in my "Miniature 24" series. As I mentioned in my previous post, and as the series name implies, all were created in my "mini tank" which measures 5" x 7" (I normally marble in a 20" x 25" tank). One of the advantages with the mini tank is that is allows you to fill your tank with paint quickly (sometimes too quickly, which is the disadvantage), giving you those bright, bold vibrant colors without your design starting to degrade. You see, as soon as the paint hits your bath, it starts to disintegrate. So the longer you work on a piece, the more the paints break up and do funky things (an effect one can use to one's advantage, of course...but only if the intention is to do so. Otherwise, it's just frustrating!). It can take less than a minute to fill a mini-tank where as it takes three to four minutes to fill the big tank to create the same vibrancy.
Those precious few minutes make a huge difference.
Untitled 383 is one of my favorites ~ not just in the "Miniature 24" series, but of all the pieces I've created. When I found out Taproot magazine was using it as their opening page, I couldn't have been happier.
This image is available in the Miniature 24 postcard set:
GIVEAWAY!! Tell me what you see or like in the images above and you'll be entered into a drawing to receive your own Miniature 24 postcard set! Leave your thoughts in the comments by midnight on Friday, June 7.
~ Comments now closed...and the winner is Annika! ~