I wanted to try different methods of reworking the ‘lost’ cine frames, and my tutor pointed out that tracing paper might be a good surface, as it is translucent in a similar way to celluloid and you can paint or pastel on to it. She is right – but I find it hard to believe it can hold paint or pastel well when it seems so thin and brittle. Only one way to find out.
I tape sheets of a4 tracing paper to a board. I want to make small versions of the cine frames, and I think it will be good to see how different materials sit on the paper while I’m working. I know I’m likely to scuff images as I work round the board, but having a kind of system seems a good way to force myself to concentrate and stick with this process of making and comparing, while I continue to think about where this project is going.
So I start in soft pastel again. I’m using very soft Unison pastels, which are very dry and crumbly on this brittle paper. The colours might be slightly different, as I left the box I used (for the last big pastel version in my previous post) in my studio space at Uni, and I’m working at home. Smudging them is a clumsy business. I’m hoping that I can get more of the contrast between heavy black pigment, and the translucence of the melted bubbles of celluloid.
I used a good dose of hairspray to try and fix the pastel. I also took off some areas with cotton buds to try and give more transparency where the bubbles are. Here’s a bigger image:
When it’s really dry I’ll peel it off to see whether this has worked. Then I will make the same image using other mediums on the tracing paper. I’m planning watercolour, water-soluble ink blocks, oil pastel. I’m also considering other surfaces to work on.
I’m feeling more focused now. The idea of trying to represent multilayered narratives or lost narratives visually has felt slippery, as if I’m trying to make concrete something that only has magic because it is etherial. But being methodical doesn’t feel wrong. Maybe this is because a methodical process echoes the repetition of the frames that happens when these cine films are shown.
