I wasn’t in the mood for a long day of painting today, so decided to…
Jennifer Evie II
I’ve been on the inktense pencils today as I wasn’t feeling in the mood for watercolour. I picked out this pose by Jennifer Evie; it’s her second appearance as a model on this blog. I was brave and picked a pose that included a face and a foreshortened arm but, as you can see, cropped out those tricky bits later to end up with something vaguely presentable.
For colours, I repeated a combination that I used once before: bark, baked earth, mustard and leaf green with some bits of iris blue added in places for some extra interest. But the blue didn’t really come through this time. I must have only put it down in places where there was already mustard, so it only turned the yellows to greens, leaving me with quite a boring brown and green painting.
So I added a second layer of colour, with the iris blue again but also some poppy red to contrast against the greens. I tried generally to put the red on the left and blue on the right to get some sort of temperature gradient going. At the same time I trued darkening the hair and some of the shadows with more of the bark colour. The red and blue definitely worked but I still wasn’t happy with my dark areas.
So I added a third layer of colour. This time I added charcoal grey to the shadows and to the hair. This improved things slightly. In particular it gave me some interesting granulation effects on places. Adding a fourth layer would probably have been pushing things too far with the intense pencils which, in my experience, work best with just a single wetting. So that was me done. Here’s what I ended up with before the cropping:
I’m sure you can see that the face and the foreshortened arm haven’t worked. A lot of the dark colours that I added in the second and third layers were all about darkening the right forearm and covering a lot of the face in shadow but there’s only so much I can do. So I’ve cropped out the worst bits of this one before I post it up on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Threads. While the cropped version looks a lot better, I don’t think it’s good enough to go up for sale.
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