Kristy Jo

After the big project, I’m back to one and done paintings. I thought I’d go for the inktense pencils as I’ve not used them for a couple of months and paint a naked figure as that’s what I do with inktense pencils. This is Kristy Jo, making her debut in this blog.

I really should have started with an Anthony Ryder style envelope but was feeling lazy and used a grid to get down my initial outline. After that, I identified different values in the pose by eye (so not using the Notanizer app). I then shaded darkest bits with deep indigo, then the next darkest bits with violet and the next darkest with iris blue. I put down teal green for the darkest bits long the right facing edges. Then I added some sun yellow around (not in) the brightest highlights and a tiny amount of all my reds and oranges in some random places.

After wetting all the pigment and stepping back, I was a little disappointed. The darks weren’t dark enough. I was already feeling as if this one was doomed to failure, so decided it was worth taking a huge risk and experiment by going over all the darks with ink black. This time I did use the app to identify dark areas for me. And this actually improved things, with the black making some interesting colours on top of the other colours rather than creating the dead areas that I was expecting.

If anything, the darks were now too dark compared to the rest of the painting, so I overlaid the mid tones first with iris blue and then with indigo. At the same time I added more black to the darkest of the already black areas and some more random warm colours everywhere. And after the final application of water, that was me done.

I’m not putting this one up for sale. Kristy Jo’s right thigh is a bit too thin at the top: its top edge should be slightly more vertical, reaching the body at a higher point. Her hands aren’t great either. Still, it’s blown away some cobwebs and opened my eyes to the possible use of the black inktense pencil.