JenB, Sitting

It’s absolutely roasting outside.  I promise never again to claim it’s too cold outside to paint.  But this weather!  Too hot, too sweaty and too fast drying.  But after two days off I need to do something, so it’s out with the inktense pencils.  Today’s model is JenB for the fourth time.  My paintings of Jen tend to come out OK but without ever catching the “real Jen”.  Let’s see how I get on today.

Rather than going minimalistic today, I fancied going all out on colour.  I even decided to avoid the dark neutrals (in which I include indigo) I thought I’d go colourful using some of my more successful colours: violet, fuchsia, iris blue, chilli red, mustard and leaf green.  There’s almost a whole rainbow there.
I started by pencilling in some of the chair with violet and shading violet in the darkest shadows.  After that, I used fuchsia on the lighter shadows, then the red and blue on any remaining darker bits with red on the areas that looked warmest and blue on those that looked coolest.  Then I added the green in the places that looked most flesh toned (!) and mustard on the highlights.  And after that, I tinkered a lot, using some colours over the top of others in places.  This painting was more about having fun than trying to create a masterpiece.
And after wetting, what I have isn’t a masterpiece.  It’s definitely an explosion of colour but it’s not a realistic looking figure.  There’s something stiff and rectangular about it.  This one’s not going up for sale.

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