Amie

I’m still feeling way too busy to be able to cope with painting portraits or landscapes, so it’s another figure today. The model is Amie, making her debut on this blog, and the medium is oil pastel.

I wanted to keep pushing myself so thought I’d have my first go at a figure in sculptural light with oil pastels. Sculptural light is something I’ve only tried out with intense pencils before. It’s a value based scheme where the more a plane is tilted way from my line of sight, the darker I make it. So the closest bits of the body, where the plane is perpendicular to my line of sight, should be white and the darkest bits should be in the edges of 3d shapes than bend away from me. I got the idea for this from Burne Hogarth.

I picked out this particular pose by Amie because I could see so many 3d muscular shapes on her, making it a perfect pose for sculptural light. I put down a pencil outline using a grid, then overlaid lots of ellipsoid muscular shapes on top to help me judge where to place the different values.

Because these sculptural pieces can sometimes come out looking metallic, I decided to make my metallic oil pastels the main stars of this painting. And for the first layer of colour, I used some Paynes grey to make the darks really dark and then various metallic oil pastels with different values to create the 3d effect. I stabbed in the odd red or blue dot just for the hell of it, then blended all the colours with colour shapers.

I got to a decent first layer and then went through several tinkering steps adding more of the same colours, plus a metallic blue and some white. I blended all these colours with polystyrene chips, looking to sculpt the dodgy now that I’d filled out my pencil outlines with colour. I kept going until I decided the figure couldn’t be improved any more.

I took a step back and was reasonably happy with the result but not ecstatic. So, being in an experimental mood, I thought I’d try adding a dark background. Most of the background is in the plainest black but there’s also Payne’s grey in there and the odd bit of blue or red. I blended the background with polystyrene chips and also used the chips to blend through some corrections where I didn’t think my outline was quite right. And that was me done.

I’m not a great fan of this one and I’m not putting it up for sale. The sculptural light effective there butbisn’t as extreme as I would have liked it to be. And the proportions feel a bit off and the hands don’t work for me. It was also a mistake in retrospect to add the background: against the white background, the figure was so shiny that she looked sweaty and anything that tells a story is good. Still, some worthwhile experiments today. Any experiment that you learn something from is a success even if the end product isn’t. The same goes for England managers: when Lee Carsley lost a Nations League tie at home to Greece playing a 4-1-5-0 formation I must have been the only person in the country describing that experiment as successful.