Dawn-Marie x3

I was in the mood for an Inktense pencil figure painting today. I looked around for a good model and pose and found Dawn-Marie, a model I’ve not painted before. I found three interesting poses but couldn’t make up my mind which one to use. So I went for all three.

This is three paintings superimposed on each other. One in sun yellow, one in iris blue and one in fuchsia. Some experiments on a separate piece of paper convinced me that these would work well together. I worked one colour at a time, drawing a pencil outline using a grid and a one value composition created using the Notanizer app. I put down pigment, wet it and let it dry before adding the next layer. I worked in three layers like this, rather than putting down three colours and wetting them all together, because I wanted all three separate paintings to be visible and to not blend into each other when wetting them. I put down more pigment than usual and wet it crudely, a deviation from my normal process of using limited pigment and wetting it with brush marks that suggested volume. Things were difficult enough without the extra complications of painterliness. To be honest I’m surprised I managed to get down all three paintings without screwing up somewhere, putting pigment where it wasn’t supposed to be after getting confused by an earlier layer.

It’s an interesting painting. Concentrate hard in one colour and you can see that individual painting. But the brush marks let it down. If I am to do something like this again, I need to approach each individual painting like a normal figure painting and sculpt the body with the brush marks. Putting on thinner layers of pigment might help too. Despite my misgivings, I would have put this one up for sale were it not for too many pencil marks showing up under the inks, something that’s quite unusual for me. But, yes, an interesting exercise. I’m calling this one posterised painting because I was such a slave to the Notanizer app: it’s three two value posterised paintings superimposed on top of each other.