Well, I made the decision first thing this morning that my independent experiment with egg tempera was irredeemable. There was absolutely nothing that I could do to rescue it, and indeed anything that I could think of doing was almost certain to make it worse. So that was that!
I then made an interesting and useful discovery. It did occur to me that if I took some fine sandpaper it might be possible to take the board back to the gesso surface, and start again on this or some other project. Voila! It worked! Not only did it work, but the original drawing has remained pretty well intact. As I was pretty well satisfied with that, and it will only require a couple of relatively minor alterations to correct faults in it that I had noticed previously, I find myself offered a second chance to have a go at my original design. I’m delighted!
I will have to give the project a short rest, however, because one of the things I discovered, in the course of blundering about with it, is that I really need some different colours. A major source of my difficulties derived from my ill-advised attempts to mix the colours I wanted from what I had in hand, and that didn’t work. So tomorrow I will make a call to the shop in London with which I established contact earlier and see if they can put me back on track.
It is, however, as they say, “An ill wind that blows nobody any good.” With art brought crashing to a standstill I actually found time today to clean the studio. Now that doesn’t happen very often!
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