A while back, I needed to protect a lower area of a drawing when heavily scrubbing in black chalk on the upper area. I work in pastel, standing up, the paper mounted on a large easel, and one of the by-products of pastel is fine dust. Combined with gravity, this can be especially problematic as the dust tends to settle down on the lower portions. Dark color, black chalk in particular, is hard to remove without smearing already-drawn sections. I used paper to mask off and protect these lower sections of that drawing and when I removed the paper was struck by how the tone differed in the areas I had just drawn.I decided to work in the use of some masking in my most recent drawing. While still abstract in the sense that I wasn't working from a subject, or preconceived plan, I noticed how it was looping back to a more recognizable shapes and forms of my figure drawings. For the time being, I am not sure what to make of this and will just let it be.
