Lab Book #4, Finding Space, is the first of the Lab Book series, begun in summer 2004. You may wonder what happened to lab books 1-3, the fact is there were just no interesting doodles in those books. I brought this painting to an art festival in London Ontario down by Springbank Park on the Themes River, and an experienced painter looked at it for some time. She liked the energy and the lines, but felt that there was no overall composition to hold the imagery together. The comment gave me the idea to fit all of the doodles in a unified theme, the next paintings in the series were more unified culminating in Lab Book #7, Construction at Site 22, but Lab book #6, Spanky's Fantastic Cathedral is one of my favorites.
The painting technique of all of the 'lab book series' are similar, I start with light outlines in watercolour, flipping through the lab book and picking the best doodles. Then I overlay greyish washes to establish volume and light, and simultaneously apply colour washes. The trick to making this style work is grouping the doodles with similar colours and values...you see most of the colours in the bottom left of the picture are orange and red, while a few inches to the right it goes to more of a blue-green.
Lab Book #4, Finding Space, 22 x 24" cold press, summer 2004 (No. 1992)
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