Candle In Oil Pastel

I’m not in the mood at the moment to take my time and come up with perfect paintings. Ā I’m feeling loose and energetic and wanting to rattle off some fast, energetic works instead. Ā Today, I tried to follow an exercise from the Bill Buchman book, and for starting material I used the same pose from Candle as yesterday.

I followed bill’s instructions pretty well at first. Ā I put down the drawing without putting a grid on the paper, although I admit I worked from a photo with a grid to help me put my first marks in the right place. I first drew the figure with a tiny spare chunk of yellow oil pastel, then the same with red, then blue. Ā In all three cases I would twist the chunk in my fingers to vary line thickness.
What I ended up with wasn’t too bad and is where I should have stopped, but I disobeyed instructions and carried on. Ā First I tried some finger smoothing to harden some of the edges. Ā Then I used white oil pastel to smooth out some colours in highlighted areas. Ā Then I did loads more finger smoothing. Ā I thought the painting was missing a bit of yellow, so added more of this at the end and tried to smooth it in.
The final result was just a bit bleh. Ā If there’s anything encouraging about this it’s the gestural shape to the bottom but otherwise it’s like something that’s been rushed with little or no care. Ā Which it was. Ā But at least I can say that I completed one of Bill’s exercises, even if I carried on working and ruined it. Ā To be fair, Bill does say in his book is that knowing when to stop is the difficult bit.

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