Open Casket - experiment painting the impression with a dark wash

 Dedicated readers will recall that I made a pact never to paint natural materials, and that I regularly break that pact, with varying degrees of regret. I'm concerned that the contrast between the impression and the surrounding material isn't clear enough, and that it's therefore hard to see the shape, leading it to look distorted. I therefore experimented with painting one of my prototypes in a mixture of diluted PVA and black poster paint. The aim was to see how the plaster took the paint, but also to see how it looked when it was then covered by the planned layer of PVA-soaked fabric.

The 'point' of the picture above is that the painted areas do show through the fabric above, but do so in a subtle way. Broadly the fabric looks darker in those areas, but not in a way that screams that it has been painted.

I therefore decided to be 'brave' and paint the whole impression:

I actually think it looks way more interesting now! Clearly it's a bit 'over-cooked' but that's deliberate as it will be much more subtle when it's covered in the final layer. I am half tempted not to apply the final layer, but I think it will make the overall finish better, and it will also cover the annoying strip of exposed foam on the bottom left. That said, I feel like I might push the final layer a lot closer to the plaster layer, so it better mimics the shape, and I might actually paint the final fabric layer, albeit much more subtly... I think I need to do some experiments with a wet sheet before I commit - in particular I wonder if I want to have folds in particular areas, or to avoid folds at all. Folds in different areas might have different connotations - folds in the surround but not the impression might evoke the way luxury items are packaged in a silk lined case, whereas folds on the impression but not the surround might evoke the sense of a body removed abruptly. I suspect I'll end-up going with no folds, or rather, minimal folds.

I also made a start on the digital component. I found a very simple algorithm online to produce ripple patterns. It appears to work by making each pixel equal to the average of it's neighbours from the previous frame. However, it only considers pixels above/below/left/right (I'm sure there's a name for that, but I can't think what it is (apparently there is not, there's a whole reddit of people arguing about it with 'bordering' being a strong contender)), which means that I don't think it will handle reflections correctly from an irregular border since it can't 'see' pixels that are not rectalinear. I'm going to do some experiments and see - it might be that it's not 'correct' but it looks good enough anyhow...