:: The secret is circular.

Oceanic continues . . .

I was trying to come up with a new way to create surface texture, not just for this series but for my bleach work in general, and I think I've stumbled on to something. The secret is . . . circles!

I've always scribbled and doodled creatures and weird plant life constructed of circles with pen and pencil. There are stacks of sketchbook pages in my portfolios and flat files, not to mention the poor phonebook and just about every other available surface. But I think I've finally found a way to make it really work with the bleach.

After making the circles and leaving some of them open loops for the black to show in the middle I filled in the spaces around them to lighten it and make it a solid mass. It made it feel like sculpting in a way. It's a great way to lighten large areas, even if it did take almost an hour just to do this small piece!

It's a tedious process but I really like the possibilities . . .