more graves piece in the studio

I haven't posted much on this for a little while. The piece has now been painted. There was a story to the painting.

When I originally thought of painting the piece I just assumed I would use white paint, but then had doubts. A friend suggested I paint it a neutral colour like grey. I thought that was a good idea. After awhile though I thought I'd rather use a pink/brown colour. I had a kind of idea what I wanted, but didn't know if I could find it. I decided early on during the search for the right paint that I wanted to use an off the shelf paint rather than a specifically mixed colour. Simply because all the components so far were off the shelf products, and it seemed to fit better. After about three days I settled on a brown that I think calls itself Oatmeal. It's less pink than I originally conceived, but it works well enough for me.

With the paint chosen, and with three coats over the piece it was time to place the final set of marks on top. I intended to use a combination of marks perhaps indicating archaeological features, as well as numbers and perhaps a small amount of text. The idea being to have a kind of ambiguity between three dimensional representation, and the kind of two dimensional representation you'll more normally see in a drawn plan of an archaeological site.

The piece of paper and the smaller card with it pictured below are my attempts to plan the marks I would add to the piece.

The card (faint to see I know) was my first sketch distilling the marks I thought would work. There are some rubbings out evident in the upper part of the card. There may have been a number, there were certainly a few different marks. It was immediately obvious that too many marks would overcomplicate the piece. I decide to keep it simple and asymmetric.

The A4 sheet below was a clarification of what I'd effectively decided on the card, just trying to see how it might look in combination with the grave forms.

And here are some close ups of some of the marks as they now appear on the piece:

Views of the top and bottom half of the piece:

Then finally the whole piece as it stands now. I may need to put some form of protective coating on the piece, but I think it's pretty much finished now. In a way I feel quite lost. I don't think I've ever felt quite like it when I've come to the end of a piece of work before.