PeachK II

A late start today after deciding, on this morning’s walk, to make some more changes to the new search widget on this website. So I went for a quick figure painting with the inktense pencils. Today’s model is PeachK, making her second appearance, in the same pose as last time but from a different direction.

After getting a pencil outline down using a grid, I put down deep indigo in the darkest areas, then iris blue, leaf green and sherbert lemon as the values I could see got lighter. I overlapped the lighter colours onto the darker ones in an attempt to graduate values. Then I wet the colours with a water brush, sometimes in dark areas, sometimes in light areas, encouraging colours to mix on the paper while also trying to shape the body with the direction of my strokes. And I added a tiny bit of Persian red in a couple of places to try to warm things up a bit.

This is what I ended up with:

It definitely looked unfinished. In particular, some of the darks needed to be darker, some edges needed to be harder, the hair needed some texture and it could all have done with a bit more warmth. So I added more colour. The same four colours from before plus sepia to really darken those darks. This second layer was all about strengthening the darks with sepia and indigo, strengthening the midtones with blue and green to blend into the darker darks, hardening the edge down the left, varying marks and colours in the hair and the addition of a lot more red everywhere. And everything worked. So I stopped.

And, you know what? I really like where this one landed. Green and red are opposites on the colour wheel so should either be clashing or creating neutral colours but they work well together here. The hair texture and cylindricalness of the thighs are both excellent. There are a lot of lost edges too, which I always like. Maybe the backbone’s a bit dark though? And the transition from lights to white highlights on the back is a bit abrupt. But so much else to like. This one’s going up for sale, with the price to be found here.