Here we are back to Friday after Thursday and another watercolor to view. I’m making plans to go to the new Gauguin show in DC next week. Couple of us artist fellows on a day trip. I saw a big Gauguin show about twenty years ago and apparently this one has a different focus. We’ll see. In the meantime here’s a sequence of the figure study I did last night. I took a slightly different approach by building it up with very faint washes. It worked pretty well and I’ll probably work this way more often.
The whole page was washed with a very pale yellow. To get the paper wet and to take away the stark whiteness of the page. This picture shows lots of shadows created by the multiple ceiling lights passing my body as I leaned over the painting to take the picture. The shadows are kind of interesting, too. I think. This was full sized sheet of Arches paper. I covered the whole sheet with a pretty large brush and did the drawing with a medium sized sable brush…dipping into a small bowl of tinted water.
I was pretty happy with the way things were going at this point. I put the bench the model was resting on in using more or less the true colors. The background is still just yellow…the shadows in the photo are creating the illusion of some subtle color washes. Nice idea but that. not what was happening. I ended up placing the figure a bit low on the page, which isn’t terrible, but I’d have prefered it to have been half an inch higher. I sort of skipped ahead to this final version. I ended up using some dark lines to draw in some of the features. Notice the background is now created with some actual painted washes rather than random shadows. I had a great time painting in the background. It’s all fun!
Recent Comments