Love Or Confusion

Another hot day and there’s some football on later but I’ve had too many days off during May. So I’ve gone for something fast and relaxing. It has to be a figure painting in inktense pencils.

Today’s model was Nicole Vaunt with an absolutely cracking pose. Style-wise, I went posterised today. I created a four value plan using the Notanizer app and used a grid to put down the simplest of outlines. For colours, I used the sea blue, Persian red and sun yellow that worked so well for InnaBG In Inktense Pencil. I went over all the darks with the blue, the darks and midtones with the red and the lights, darks and midtones with the yellow. All of this using only the edges of the pencil leads and most of it by eye with reference to the value plan: this wasn’t a day to be colouring in shapes.

After wetting my initial shapes and standing back, I decided that some of the darks weren’t dark enough and needed more blue, so I went over all the darks again with more blue and wet the new layer of pigment. Obviously this made the darks too dark compared to the midtones, so I went over all the darks and midtones with another layer of red and wet this. And that was me done.

It was when adding this second red layer that I made my only mistake if the day. I didn’t let the face dry enough first and ended up with a bright red mark along the lips even before I added any water. Because these inktense pencils are such hard core strainers, I couldn’t lift out any of that red mark, so I was stuck with it.

I think this one was a success. It’s up for sale, with the price to be found here. This trio of colours work really well together, resulting in something that looks well lit up, appropriate for today’s weather. The proportions of darks and lights are great and so is the distribution of darks over the page. And I’m liking that red mark over the lips. It reminds me of Heath Ledger’s Joker and adds something sinister to the painting. It’s up to the viewer to create their own story and that’s always good.