ROUND ROBIN 2 and Oil Pastels

"Humming + Puddle" and "Pop + Night"

By Katy Wu

For Round Robin 2 I decided to try my hand at a medium I hadn't used in a very long time: oil pastels. What attracted me to this medium were the bright vibrant colors, the creamy consistency, and they reminded me of crayons (I used Sennelier pastels). I'm somewhat familiar with soft pastels but oil pastels have fairly different properties. They do not blend/smudge easily, they are good for making broad strokes and large shapes, and they are not very forgiving. This meant I had to figure out which colors I needed and how to get the colors I didn't have in color studies before starting the actual painting.

Here are some photos of scratch paper I experimented on for paintings from Round Robin 2:

Since oil pastels don't take to smudging well, I had to overlay darker colors over lighter colors to see if I could get the results I wanted. You can only overlay so many colors (about 3) on top of each other before it gets muddy or the paper stops accepting anymore medium.

Once I find a combination of colors that works, I would write the names of the colors down so I could remember them later. In a way, I am figuring out any part of the painting that requires a gradation of colors or a specific color that needs to be mixed.

When starting the actual painting I would work from light to dark. It's much easier to cover up any mistakes if you put a darker color over a lighter color with oil pastel. If I messed up I could only scrape some of the oil pastel off with a knife.

Oil pastels are like crayons for adults, they look like juicy oil paintings, and it's fun to do large expressive paintings with them without having to fuss over any details!

Daniela will be making a post about her work on Round Robin the following week, see you then!

Child + Web

When we first released the ROUND ROBIN books, without explaining much of them ahead of time, we hoped you'd have a fresh experience reading through the artwork and the word game. Hopefully, you also had fun interpreting and visualizing the words in your own way. Now, we are very curious of what you thought of the books, and would love to hear your thoughts ! Please drop us a line in the comment if you wish !

Also, in the next few weeks, we are going to take turns sharing some of our making of process for the two ROUND ROBIN books, please stay tuned !

" Child + Web "

by Jennifer C. Chang

Starting on the piece, " Child" and " Web" both words seemed to me to be very literal nouns, that I had a difficult time to break away from circling the convenient interpretations, like, a human child on a spider web ?...children forming a gymnastic pyramid ?... all too literal silly ideas.

Finally, I started to define "child" to be someone vulnerable or even tiny, it reminded me of Thumbelina. Growing up, I often wondered if it'd be quite an intimidating experience for Thumbelina to encounter a normal sized bird for the first time? I remembered some experimental paper birds I made a few years back for another personal project. Each bird was cut out from one small piece of white paper and minimally glued together. The pale paper birds had a little emotionless or unknown eerie quality to them... I imagined it could be frightening for someone like the size of Thumbelina to encounter a group of them on the street, walking and surrounding her in the middle of a sun-lit noon,... wordless it'd be hard to tell if they are friends or foes !

A little different from the first book, I tried different ways to explore flat patterns with compositions in ROUND ROBIN 2. Hope to use both abstract shapes and scenarios to interpret the words and the emotions out of their literal definitions. In this piece, I hoped to use the obscure paper bird shapes to create a physical "web", as well as the net like grids on the floor 'webbing' the tiny Thumbelina, who reaches high out to the sky, or maybe someone off frame...

For the fun of it, here is a very hand-made time lapse I tried to make from some phone photos i took in progress, cheers !