CharlieK With Sword

Oil pastels today and it’s a figure painting and a third appearance on the blog for CharlieK. Make her feel welcome.

I picked out a pose that would allow me to leave lots of highlighted areas of the body white and to leave it up to viewers’ imaginations to fill in the missing bits. I got some help form the Notanizer app, dividing the picture into highlights, darks and lights and I marked all these on the paper in pencil.

I started by filling the midtone areas with dots of a warm, sunny yellow and the dark areas with dots of Venetian red. After that, I added some fleshtone dots to all the flesh areas, along with some random blues, reds, greens and yellows. I tried to introduce terminator shadows in players using some dark colours. For the hair I added dots in all sorts of colours and for the sword I used some metallic colours. Because some of these shapes were quite small, I thought the dots didn’t add enough detail, so I blended them with colour shapers, taking colours up to the edges.

I probably should have stopped there but I kept fiddling, trying to make all the colours more interesting without success. The flesh colours look fine, very realistic, but all the crazy colours I included there have disappeared. The hair ended up a bit too uniform brown, maybe even muddy, and the paper was starting to feel saturated with pigment.

Then I fiddled some more. I added the dark and midtone background areas and I think these contrast well with the fleshy tines and make things more interesting. But I also tried to soften the edges between midtone and highlights on the body and ended up losing most of the highlights. The only highlights I had left were down the right of Charlie’s torso and there’s were looking out of place, so I coloured them in with messy fingerprints. I smoothed out colours in places with my fingers and darkened the bum crease before calling it a day.

It’s a long way from bringing of my best figure paintings. It has one redeeming feature, though, and that’s the sense of energy and movement, which I think is going to be a common theme for these oil pastel figures. Charlie’s worth a place in the shop window, so she’s up for sale with the price to be found here.