Pumpkins in Black and White

Here is a perfect example of projects gone wrong. These little pumpkins were going to be painted in a completely different style than what you see here. Yes, they were going to be black and white. Overall, it's not how I had imagined it.

The idea was to use crackle over the black base so it would show through the white. The directions on the bottle said "let solution dry 20 to 60 minutes". I decided to approach it as an experiment. Each pumpkin would be painted at different times to see how it affected the crackle.

Essentially, they were all failures. I even varied the brand of paint and the thickness of the crackle solution for the last one. Barely noticeable difference.

I've come to suspect that a) crackle works best on larger projects, but more importantly, b) I bought a dud brand.

Either way, I'm pretty disappointed.

So I decided to approach these fellas with the classic Ghoul Friday painting technique - layered, textured and grainy. Bah. Fine.

They will never look right to me because it's not what I wanted. And since they are such a far departure from what I wanted, I don't like them. I can't tell if it's because they aren't very good or because they can't satisfy an image I've had in my mind's eye for weeks.