Candace

I wanted to make this colourful with some decent greens, oranges and purples showing, so went for a triadic left key with Prussian blue, Indian yellow and quinacridone magenta as my three main colours.  There were also appearances for green apatite genuine, titanium white, cadmium red, cadmium yellow and sepia but this is a three colour painting at heart.

I started with the hair going for the Hazel Soan elephant technique.  Yellow down first, then red wet into wet, then blue wet into wet.  I did the ponytail first, to keep it separate, then the rest of the hair.  It took a couple of efforts to get all the hair shapes to similar colours, but I eventually got there and the individual primaries showing up in the hair were a nice byproduct.

Then it was on to the body.  The plan was to put down some simple yellow shapes, then glaze over some simple red shapes, then glaze over some simple blue shapes.  I did this but then also fiddled a bit afterwards where things weren’t quite right.  I guess I could have had more green and yellow showing but with lots of magenta vs orange clashes going on, there’s some vibrancy in there.

And then I had to think about the background.  The white background looked OK but left me feeling like I’d produced a sketch rather than a painting, so I decided to fill in some background.  I started with quite a watery green apatite genuine with some of the blue and yellow dropped in, some salt sprinkled on and some water spattered over to produce cauliflowers.  But somehow I’d made the background too dark and too similar a value to the figure.  I tried wetting the background and dabbing it out with kitchen roll but the Prussian blue and, to a lesser extent, the green apatite genuine are strainers. I thought about giving up at this point but decided to do some more fiddling and this was the correct decision for once.  What I did was to start by painting over the whole background in titanium white.  Some of the colour underneath mixed with the white but not enough for my liking, so I dabbed all my three primaries into the white in random places and pushed them around a bit.  Mixing with white isn’t something I’m ever going to make a habit of, but I needed to do that today to rescue this painting from the scrap heap.  In one place, there was a magenta mark that looked like a bit of tree and horizon, so I added some more marks to bring this out.

Finally, I spattered on some opaques: cadmium yellow, cadmium red and, because everything was looking a little too bright and colourful, some sepia.  I made sure to include more spatters near the bottom than the top.

And then I stopped as there was I’d reached a decent painting and there was nothing more I could do without making things worse.   It’s not bad but the left side of her neck is too wide.  It bugs me enough to not put this one up for sale.