Creative Woodworks & crafts 2005-11, страница 76

The quickest and easiest way to add depth was optically. Cool colors tend to rcccde, while warm colors appear to emerge. I

had a red-hoi llogfish on a golden glowing maple burl. It couldn't get any warmer than that! The answer was to wash a bit of cool color behind the fish so the background would reccdc, leaving the fish in the foreground. I used Cobalt Blue for Ihe wash, but any blue would work well.

I added a school of blue minnows. I did not burn many detail lines for I hem bccause I wanted the minnows to appear behind the bigger fish and some distance away from it, which is right where a smart minnow would want to be. 1 also added a faint suggestion of green, another cool color, that might be a patch of seaweed for the minnows to hide in if Ihey felt threatened.

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In order to maintain the illusion of depth, I burned even fewer lines on the smaller minnows in the background.

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I like to use iridescent nail polish to add flash to hummingbirds and sparkle to eyes (see the April, 2005 issue of Creative Woodworks & Craftspage 54), so I own a LOT of nail polish in wild colors. When preparing to color the Wrasse, I grabbed every bottle of red, gold, orange, and coppcr-colored polish I had. along with a deep purple with aqua overtones polish for the tail, and sat down to play.

There is no possible way \ can tell you exactly where 1 placed cach color becausc I don't know myself. I know I started off using a color called "Tequila Sunrise" by Topaz for the basic red of the body and then blended in some "Sun Sparked" by Topaz for the belly. After that, things got a litdc out of hand! I applied dabs of Revlon's "Gleamer" to highlight the belly and "Crystal Glam" (purple) .and "Mellow" (pale blue with a pink sheen) for the tail. Then I dabbed a little "tee Copper" here and a bit of Gold there until, by the time Wes and Alicc arrived to photograph the project, I'm not sure if my fish was glowing with pride or blushing from embarrassment! Either way, this is one mighty Hogfish!

After the how-to photos were taken, we all agreed that the project lacked "something," but wc couldn't figure out just what it was. We let it be at that point, ralher than "forcing" something to happen. Inspiration is fleeting, and when you try to force it simply to finish a project, it usually gets worse—much worse! Later, I dccidcd that it looked too flat because everything was on the same plane. There are two ways to give a piccc depth— physically and optically—so I did both.

76 • Creative Woodworks 6. Cretts November 2005