Isabella

At the time of writing, it looks like it’s been six days since my last painting but looks can be deceptive. Because I was busy with another painting during the week, one which I’m having to hold back on publishing for now. Because reasons. But I still thought I should do something today, just to keep this blog going and to not lose viewers. I was up really late last night, again because reasons, so was up late today and didn’t have much time available for painting. So I did what I always do in those circumstances and came up with an inktense pencil figure painting. Today’s model is Isabella. It’s her debut on this blog; please make her feel welcome.

The big objective today, just like every time with the inktense pencils, was to keep things minimal and to leave as much as possible to the viewers’ imaginations. I used the Notanizer app for once, creating a four value plan. After getting it down on paper, I went over all the darks in violet, all the darks and midtones in fuchsia and all the lights, darks and midtones in Persian red. I wet the colours and took a step back.

This three value, posterised image was only ever meant to be a starting point, so I was always expecting to need to do more, which I did. I went over some of the darks with more violet and a bit of deep indigo in places. The Persian red and fuchsia weren’t that distinguishable, so I added more fuchsia in the mid tones. And because some of my boundaries were looking too hard, I cooled things down with a bit of iris blue down the right and warned up some bits on the left (including previously lost edges) with orange sorbet, sun yellow and sherbert lemon. Then I wet this new layer, took a step back, felt happy and that was me done.

I say that was me done but I still needed to rub out some pencil lines. And that’s where I screwed up, creasing the paper: you can see in the image here how that’s ruined the painting. So it’s not going up for sale. It would have done otherwise though: there’s lots of white space and hidden edges and most of the hard edges between different colours have been softened.