Adhira

I warning the mood for an oil pastel landscape today and spent ages looking through loads of photos on my iPad before deciding that all of them would look better in watercolour, or even in coloured pencil.  So I gave up on that plan and instead went for some figure drawing.  Today it’s a debut for Adhira as model; I chose the particular photo because there were some big, bright highlighted areas on the body that I fancied leaving as plain white paper.

I started by putting down a 3×4 grid and marking out an outline in pencil.  For once I trusted my eye to fill out the grid with shapes rather than using a ruler to accurately pin down important points.  Then came the colours.  I started with the body, intending leave the background white.  I stabbed in lots of spots in lots of different colours.  Some of these were impressionistic colours I could see in the source photo, some were  dark or light colours inspired by the values in the source photo, some were sensible local colour and some were just random.  The random colours were often greens as I’m working from a set of oil pastels designed for landscapes.  I was intending to keep the lightest places white but that didn’t really happen.  In fact I ended up putting in a layer of white stabs but these, rather than being vertical stabs resulting in spots, were angled stabs that began smearing out some of the darker spots underneath.  And finally, of course, I mixed all the colours together using a rubber tool on a stick in detailed areas and my fingers everywhere else.  With the fingers, I was trying to sculpt the body with finger strokes both along and around cylindrical shapes.

For the hair, I just kept throwing in whichever colours I felt like at the time.  At one point my fingers were mixing it into quite a muddy colour, so I scraped off a lot of the paint, added on a few stabs of my favourite colours and gave it a minimal mixing with my finger.  I think I managed to rescue the hair from disaster but it was looking close at times and there are lessons there for me about the dangers of mixing too many colours in this medium.

I added the background at the end after seeing far too many finger prints on the paper.  I stabbed in some blue, red and green spots, then started the mixing by stabbing yellow and white into them at an angle, just like I did with the white on the body.

After stepping back, I decided that Adhira’s right shoulder was looking too pale compared to the rest of her body, so stabbed in some pinks and blues and mixed them in with a finger.  And that was me done.

It’s a decent effort, with lots of the individual components of the impressionistic flesh tones still visible.  I like that.  Adhura’s right hand isn’t brilliant but I guess if someone didn’t like it, they could still buy the painting, crop it and put it in a square frame.  I’ve given the game away there: this one’s up for sale.