Expressive CharlieK

I’ve got a GP appointment in the diary for later this afternoon, so went for an inktense figure so that I wouldn’t feel rushed. It’s a fourth appearance for CharlieK as a model on this blog and, touch wood, none of my paintings of her have been flops so far.

I started with three colours that are starting to become a habit: sea blue, Persian red and sun yellow. I put down a pencil outline of the whole figure and, without any help from the Notanizer app, went over what looked to me like the darkest areas with the blue pencil, then over these and the midtones with the red, then over everything that didn’t look like a highlight with the yellow. And then I got adventurous, adding field green, apple green, iris blue, violet, fuchsia, paprika, wild flame and orange sorbet here and there in random places to hopefully create the odd interesting spot. Then I went over everything with water.

The result was something that looked incomplete. In particular the darks weren’t dark enough and were a bit too green for me. So I went over those darks again with the sea blue and even put some deep indigo into the very darkest areas. I might also have made some of the blue areas bigger but with only a thin layer of pencil. And then I wet this second layer.

What I ended up with was a definite improvement. It’s just that the body was looking a bit green, like the She Hulk or an Orion slave girl. So I went over everything with a thin layer of wild flame to warm things up and, after wetting this final layer, that was me done.

It’s not bad, this one. It’s very expressive as a result of (i) using observation rather than the Notanizer app, (ii) throwing in those random colours, (iii) the visible brush marks, and (iv) the longer the process went on, not working from the source photo at all. Maybe I should have stopped one layer earlier, though, with the greenish figure. Because the colour I’ve ended up with here is a bit weird and unnatural looking. My figures always have weird colours, I know, but this one looks as if I was aiming for realistic colours and failed. I’ve ended up with a cool rust colour, something that shouldn’t even exist. Still, CharlieK’s up for sale, with the price to be found here.