CasD

After needing to take two attempts at painting the Earp brothers, I felt like I’d wasted a day of my life, so after finishing the corrected version this morning I was ready to go out to bat again.  The idea for this one has been kicking around in my head for a couple of weeks and it felt like a relaxing painting to spend the afternoon on.  Today’s model is CasD, making her debut.  Make her feel welcome.

The idea was to go for a mixture of a line painting with fineliners and a posterised single valued painting with coloured pencils.  I started by putting down a pencil outline and then going over some of the edges with the brush fineliner, a pen that allows me to vary the thickness of lines.  I didn’t put in all the edges but was selective.  I think I made the right choice of edges, including an indication of the collar bones.

And then it was time to add the coloured pencils.  I started with the Notanizer app, looking for a single value plan that would give me the right proportions of dark and light shapes.  I found one that I’d liked.  In retrospect, maybe I should have deviated from it slightly by leaving out the dark edge down the left of Cas’ torso – it would have made a great lost edge.

I started by shading in all the dark areas with delft blue.  Once this was down I didn’t need any source photos on the iPad so could watch the football.  Happy St Totteringham’s Day everybody!  After the delft blue, I applied another ten layers, all in different colours.  I started with dark red, then dark pthalo green, then helio blue reddish, these three making up the foursome of colours that I like to use for dark backgrounds.  After this, rather than repeating the same four colours, I started using whatever colour I felt was missing from what was on the paper.  And I ended up adding layers of cadmium orange, red violet, green gold, Prussian blue, pine green and dark chrome yellow.  Every colour I added seemed to result in a really interesting mix of colours on the paper.  But after that tenth layer the tooth of the paper felt full and I had to stop.

I thought there was too much of a contrast between the dark shadow shape and all the white highlights, so with those same colours I added some random scribbles along the edge of the dark shape. Then, to finish off, I applied a blender pen to all the coloured pencil marks.  And that was me done.

It’s a good painting, no doubt about that, and up for sale.  I think the blender pen might have been a mistake though.  It’s homogenised the colours too much and I can no longer see the individual pencil colours so well.  This might have looked better if I’d just blended the pencils with a paper stump.  Or maybe the blended colour might have looked better without the fineliner lines.  There you go: I already have two ideas about slightly different approaches next time I try a painting like this.