Ginger

So the idea of this one is to first put down a really fast gesture drawing.  We’re talking spending 10-15 seconds on it and that time disappears telly quickly.  I cheated slightly by marking down the edges of a 3*5 grid to help me get things roughly right but otherwise this first step was just thrown down with little thought.  I probably took more like a minute in the gesture drawing because I came back adding blues and yellows over the light and shadowy side of the sanguine drawing that I started with.

The second step is to take time over doing a contour drawing over the same piece of paper.  Again I cheated not just by having the grid as a reference but also by looking at the paper far more often than I should have done.  And once the contour drawing was down, I couldn’t resist dragging some random primary colours all over the background.

And then I dipped a brush in water and used it to wet all the marks and to bring out the colours.  It looks as if I’ve probably put down too much colour in the figure (as usual) and that the very light layer that I put on the background  might have looked better on the figure.  Oh well.

I wasn’t happy about the lack of three dimensionality in the painting, so I did two bits of tinkering.  First I used white gouache to paint some highlights on the figure.  These contrasted a bit too much with the Artgraf colours, so I wet them and dabbed them with kitchen paper; they look better now.  And to give the highlights something dark to stand against, I darkened the background on the right and lightened it on the left with more primary colour marks.  But to dilute the new background colours, I dabbed the marks with wet kitchen paper rather than using a brush and I quite like the effect.  And that was me done.

The idea behind the gesture/contour drawing combination was to bring out some energy and movement and that seems to have worked.  There’s definitely something there in the angle of the shoulders.  Maybe there would have been even more energy if I’d not cheated in places.  Otherwise, though, this isn’t great.  Definitely not worth putting in the shop window.  There are some lessons there for me (not for the first time) about how little dry Artgraf colour I need to put on the paper.  So the experiment worked and I learned something.  Tomorrow will be another day.