Ann And Rebecca On The Shiraz

With England poised to score an innings victory over India at Headingley, it was never going to be anything but the inktense pencils today. Ā I’m too messy with the watercolours and oil pastels to be allowed to use them indoors in front of the telly. Ā Oh, I could have gone for markers I guess. Ā But Ā didn’t. Ā Oh well.

I wanted to keep pushing myself, so I tried out some new ideas on this one. Ā I also gave myself the challenge of a double. Ā The new idea I tried was to mark out everything in rollerball to start with. Ā With a table and chairs in there, this also nailed down my perspective early on. Ā I also tried out some cross hatch shading on the tables and chairs as I wanted these to be in a different style to the models.
To try to keep everything fitting together, I made sure to reuse the colours on the wine, wine label and nail varnish in the flesh tones. Ā I also tried to distinguish the two models by using more red in the one on the left and more green in the one on the right. Ā For the wooden table and chairs., I started with earth6 tones but the added in the occasional extra colour when I was putting in the flesh tones.
I wasn’t that happy with what I ended up with, so I did one last bit of tinkering, adding in a complementary background in tangerine and sun yellow.
It’s still not great, though, is it? Ā Rollerball lines are too defining (leaving me missing edges or ambiguities) and too monotonous with all the lines the same width. Ā The cross hatching hasn’t really worked – it would have been far better to just use dark tones. Ā Still, if you don’t have experiments that fail, you’ll never learn anything. Ā So I’m done with starting with rollerball on works like this (although I don’t rule it out for urban landscapes). Ā I’m not sure whether the figures are too dark or too light. Ā This looks like a watercolour without a value plan: I think I need to keep my figure drawings simple. Ā If I want a chair, then only one figure. Ā If I want two figures, then no furniture.
One for the bin.

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