In the last several years of his life, Gilliam began producing tondos, experimenting with several sizes and formats, saturated fields of color, each based on a specific range of hues. Like the Drapes, they foreground Gilliam’s interest in the sculptural dimension of painting, and their making involved the use not only of paint, but sawdust, metal, encaustic, and wood scraps, some of which were the by-products of studio processes involved in the making of other bodies of work. Gilliam employed scraping tools—including metal rakes—to mark fields of color, augmenting their rich surface textures and revealing multiple layers of pigment.