EvaE In Oil Pastel

I thought I’d better give the oil pastels an outing while the weather is still cold enough for them to not melt. And with all my landscapes being in soft pastel and all my portraits posterised in watercolour for the time being (in the hope of getting on to LAOTY or PAOTY) today was a day for figure painting. Today’s model is EvaE, someone who I’ve painted a number of times.

This was just a case of putting down a pencil outline, filling it with various dots of colour and smoothing out the colours. Today I started by smoothing out the dots with the white oil pastel in the lighter areas before moving on to light English red (a pink) in the darker areas. I should have added a lot more coloured dots at the beginning because everything ended up smoothed out into something too monotone looking for my tastes. So I ended up adding a few more layers of dark blues, browns and blacks in the shadows and light yellows and whites in the highlights. I smoothed these colours with a colour shaper and with my fingers. Things were muddy at times but I eventually to something I was happy with. And I added in a background to cover up all the inevitable fingerprints. And that was me done.

This one feels just about good enough to be put in the shop window and you can find the price here. There was a time when I’d be ecstatically happy with a painting like this but I look at this one today and see my worst painting of the year so far. There are interesting colours and 3D effects but it doesn’t feel like there’s a human being on the paper. Is it the hands! The left arm? The right shoulder? Maybe all of them. It’s not a disaster but something in there isn’t chiming for me.