Heather

Time for a break from the dogs, so I did a bit of figure drawing.  Today’s model is Heather.

I chose quite a straightforward pose with an easily detachable head as I was feeling quite lazy.  I thought about a monochrome painting but instead chose to go with violet, shiraz and a red.  I found myself adding some indigo to the darker bits at the end.

Three interesting deliberate techniques things that I did with this one were:

– to have some missing edges.  Today they’re on the left breast and thigh.

– to use interesting shadow colours.  The shadows mainly indigo closest to the model (whe shadows are most intense) but more colourful further away.

– to be more choosy about which pencils marks I wet.  There are a small number of places on this one where I left the pencil dry because more ink would not be beneficial to the painting.  In particular, around some of the limbs, I painted the shapes of the limbs with water rather than painting over all the pencil marks.  As well as helping to correct inaccuracies in the original drawing, this seems to add a bit of energy.

The only niggle I have about this painting is how, if you screw up your eyes, it looks as if a lot of Heather’s body (her left arm in particular) is outlined very thickly in purple.  This is because I followed the shadows on her body quite literally, wanting a painting that would make sense in monochrome if all the colours except purple were filtered out.  Maybe I should have used a different colour for the shadows on the other side of the arm.

Heather’s a winner though.  She’s up for sale.