Candace In Inktense Pencil

I’ve booked the train tickets and am all set for a trip to the National Gallery tomorrow. Being the neat and tidy guy that I am, that means that today’s artwork needed to be fast and clean, leaving no mess and nothing drying or half completed to sit around for a couple of days. So that means inktense pencils and a naked figure. I quite fancied doing a figure in landscape format for a change, so picked out this pose by Candace. It’s her second appearance in the blog.

I tried getting down an outline using Anthony Ryder’s blocking in technique but it wasn’t working for me today, so I went for a grid instead . But I’ll be persisting with blocking in.

Colour-wise, my plan was to start with sea blue in the darkest places, then Persian red in the next darkest, overlapping the blue in places, then some sun yellow around where the midtones met the highlights. But I screwed up and ended up using deep indigo rather than sea blue, making my blues darker than I’d intended.

I did identify those dark areas using a two value plan on the Notanizer app, moving the slider until I got to a minimal set of darks on the underside that were enough to convey the pose. These are the bits that I shaded in indigo. Then I moved the slider just far enough that the nipples appeared. I stopped there and used that plan as a guide for my reds. To give some definition, I added saddle brown to Candace’s hair and teal green (which I was determined to use somewhere) to the shadows. I also added a little bit of fuchsia to the red in places for a bit of variety.

After I wet all the marks, allowing colours to run together, I identified two problems. One was that the crack between Candace’s buttocks was too tall and too vertical. I managed to change the angle slightly but it still goes all the way up to the edge above it, which it shouldn’t. The other problem was that the brown in Candace’s hair was too light, making it stand out too much. So I added more indigo to the hair. As a precaution against the hair becoming too dark, I added more indigo to the very darkest of the dark bits (so not all of the original indigo areas, just some of them). The hair’s probably still stands out (as too dark now) but I didn’t want to overwork things, so stopped there.

The final painting has its issues. There’s the dark hair, the bum crack and a weird shaped left buttock. And I can’t help thinking this would have looked a lit better if I’d picked up the right blue pencil. On the other hand, the top of the painting is fantastic. Just like the best bits in a BB King guitar solo were the empty gaps he left between notes, the best bits of this painting are the bits where I’ve left the paper white. Candace is up for sale, with the price to be found here.