Painting With Smoke

I bought an art book this week that I've wanted to buy for several years.

It's called "Art from Intuition" by Dean Nimmer.

My daughter and I took a workshop from Dean (& friend and artist, Jane Davies) when he was in the process of writing this book. We had a great time that day and were able to try alot of the exercises that are in this book.

One idea of his is to draw with smoke. Sounded like fun to me -I must have some latent pyromaniac tendencies - and I knew that my 15 year old son, Jamie would like it.

Here is my finished piece

Too bad I didn't think about taking pictures while we were making it.

The basic process though was to light a candle, hold the paper (I used poster board) upside down and touch the tip of the flame to the paper. Depending on how you move the flame, you really can get some cool shades of smoke and shapes on the paper. After you have all the smoke you want. he suggests spritzing it with water, erasing some of the marks, and/or adding some charcoal or ink.

I couldn't find an eraser to remove some of the smoke marks, so I used a piece of polymer clay. (worked great). After removing some of the smoke, we then applied a second layer of smoke in places. We also tried misting some water on the paper to see how the second layer of smoke would work on wet paper.

After all that was done, I used my "polymer clay" eraser to make the circles and the sets of horizontal lines.

This was really fun and I already have more ideas for my next smoke drawings. Not only would it look good in my "black/white art only" entryway, I think these sheets would be great to add to collage pieces.

Here is some more information about painting with smoke (called fumage) and more detailed directions. Take a look at Wikihow