A blur of golden jaguar in the jungles of Costa Rica.
The first assignment from my Mixed Media Painting classes was to do a painting inspired by the phrase, “And all I could do was remember…“
The story.
We were driving in the Guanacaste jungle of Santa Rosa National Park in Costa Rica when an iguana ran directly in front of us, followed by a dark shadowy object that burst through the foliage. A jaguar!
The jaguar was as freaked to see our jeep as we were to see the jaguar. Its mouth fell open, displaying fangs worthy of the great jaguar masks of Mexico. Our mouths fell open as well.
It screamed and then somehow managed to stop mid-leap, pivot around on one foot and disappear back into the jungle without a trace. None of us managed to get our cameras out in time so the blur of golden jaguar and its iguana prey exists only as a memory…
For the iguana prey I used a photo of El Jefe, the huge, ancient, and somewhat battered iguana that lived next door to us at Melvin’s in Ostional on Nicoya Peninsula.
For this first project we were supposed to use image transfers so I transferred the photo of El Jefe by placing a high contrast laser print of him on a rough pre-painting of jaguar and jungle. Note that in the transfer process, El Jefe is now reversed.
The grassy plaster texture was applied in my second class. I think I quite like the tension between the hunter and its prey, and the blurred spots but am not sure where I am going next with this painting.
Mixed Media Class Experience:
- My first mixed media class – selecting images suitable for transfer
- I am frantically wondering, “where’s the undo button?”
- Mistakes and more mistakes (using my scribbles painting as an example)
- How to do an image transfer, method # 1
- How to do an image transfer, method # 2
- Working with image transfers two years later
- Pressing objects into spackle (or spackle into stencils) to create textures
- Additions to spackle to create even more texture on your painting
Our super instructor’s site: http://jeannekrabbendam.com/ On her site she has her work and offers lots of different workshops and courses.
Batz Gallery 