EvaE In Red And Green

It’s been a while since I used the Artgraf Blicks, so I thought I’d give them a go today. Looking at some recent swatches, I was drawn towards the neutrals that the green made with the three reds so thought I’d try to make these the stars of the show. As subject matter I picked a pose by EvaE, thinking that it would give me the opportunity make some big, energetic swooshing marks.

I started with a pencil drawing. Rather than just drawing an outline, which I normally do for figure drawing, and letting the artist inside me choose where to put down colour, I got the Notanizer app to come up with a three blue plan and drew in the outline of the shapes it recommended. This was a really bad mistake, one that sucked not just the artistic merit but also all the joy out of this painting.

Colour-wise, I started by filling in all the dark shapes with dry marks from the green block. And then I went over all the dark and middle value shoes with the three reds, different reds in different places. For both layers of colour, the shoes were quite fiddly, so I found myself colouring them in with the corners of the blocks rather than sweeping them in with the edges of the blocks. And that sweeping action is the whole point of me using these blocks.

Once the colour was all down, it was time to wet it and to see what I’d created. I started with the dark shapes. Then, when they were dry, I wetted the middle value shapes, being careful to brush the colour over the dark shapes to create some harmony. Once this was dry decided to also wet the background marks, albeit really loosely, with scribbly brush marks. I made things look even looser by spraying on water and dabbing it all off with kitchen paper. And that was me done.

And I’ve finished with a big flop. I feel nothing but shame showing this one off and can’t wait to use the back of it as scrap paper to test out colours before I throw it away. My initial drawing and my dry paint marks were too detailed and fiddly when they should have been loose and the wetting of the marks was loose when some care over detail might have rescued things.

And this wasn’t the only flop today…