CasD, Drinks Break

It’s been nine days since my last painting. December is too busy a month. I hope I’ve not lost any readers during the hiatus. The break might have been even longer. There was an exciting game going on in the World Chess Championship that was drawing my attention. But then the world champion made. Huge blunder and suddenly lost the game, leaving me a couple of hours for painting.

As is normal for me after a break, I came back gently with a figure painting using the Inktense pencils. Today’s model is CasD, someone I’ve painted once before in a different medium.

I started with sepia today, putting this in all the darkest areas. This was done by eye. I don’t feel the need to use the Notanizer app for figures. After that I added in iris blue to cool the shadows and then Persian red, leaf green and mustard wherever it felt they belonged. And then I wet the pigments as usual, with a water brush, trying to sculpt the cylindrical shapes with my brush marks. Interestingly, I saw an episode of Artist Of The Year Masterclass this week in which the hosting artist (sorry, I can’t remember which one it was) advised against this, saying that values (light/darks) should be enough to suggest form and that suggesting from with both values and mark making would confuse the viewer too much. An interesting viewpoint but, needless to say, a piece of advice that I won’t be taking. The mark making works for me.

Once everything was dry, I looked at the result and wasn’t happy, so decided to try something new and add a second layer of colour. I used the same colours except that I replaced the dirty looking sepia with violet in the darkest places. I generally reinforced the existing colours but there were a few places where I overlaid different colours or tried to change edges that weren’t quite right. I went over Cas’ hair in all the colours but mainly with the green and red in an attempt to create a dark colour.

The final painting is interesting enough but I won’t be putting it in the shop window. The violet feels a bit strong, although it wasn’t possible for me to tell before adding the water. There’s also a big shortage of white highlights and lost edges, which I do take the blame for as this would have been evident before adding the water. Worst of all, though, are the bottle and the face. Neither work. Still, the colours in the legs and lower torso look good. And, most importantly, I’ve shaken off some cobwebs.