Amy

After the warmup, I was ready to do a proper picture of Amy using the inktense pencils.

I started with a decent gesture drawing.  There’s a nice undulating line down her back and right thigh.  After that, the idea was to shade the shadows in lightly with blacks and greys and the flesh tones lightly using whatever reds, yellows, blues and greens I fancied, while trying to get some sort of 3D effect.  And to somehow do that Charles Reid thing of merging shadows on Amy into the background shadows.

So this is one big experiment really, and I expect some things to go wrong and hope for some things to go right.  The first thing that went wrong is that the Charles Reid shadows trick isn’t easy to pull off with these inktense pencils.  I need to keep trying on that score.  The other thing is the face and head.  I think I need to start looking for poses where I can just cut the head out.  Especially as the big success in the painting is the bum and left thigh.  I’ve got a great 3D effect going on there.  I think the little pinch at the top of the thigh helps.  That’s something I got from the Chris Legaspi book – one side stretched, the other side with pinch points.  And the colours in the skin work really well and are something I need to keep doing and that will become my style.

Interesting.  Let’s do another without a head…