Krys II

As I said yesterday, after a couple of landscape paintings featuring the tundra supergranulators, I needed to do something different before a strategic LAOTY/PAOTY motivated extended foray into pastel landscapes and tundra portraits. So I’ve been figure painting today in a completely different medium, the Artgraf blocks. Today’s model is Krys; I thought it was going to be her debut on this blog but it turns out I’ve painted her once before.

I put my source photo through the Notanizer app and decided to go for a four value plan for once. I pencilled in all the value boundaries using a grid, then masked out all the white islands and a 5mm border around the main shapes, to give me the freedom to use a water spray later if I wanted to.

I coloured in all the darks using green, with a few blue bits for variety. Then the medium and dark tones in magenta, with red and sanguine in places. And finally I put down ochre over all the lights, mediums and darks, with yellow in places.

Then I wet the marks. Despite wetting only one value at a time, I wet the pigment using random dib dabs all over the place and regularly cleaning the brush in kitchen paper. I find that dib dabbing creates more interesting textures. I started by wetting all the dark areas. Then I wet the medium tones. I really should have dragged the mediums over into the darks to avoid the painting by numbers look and I tried to correct this later by layering and wetting a little magenta over the top of the darks. When I wet the light, yellow areas, I did drag this colour over the reds and darks and I think the yellow/red boundaries look softer and better than the red/dark boundaries.

Finally, I gave everything a light spray water and, once everything was dry, removed all the making fluid and that was me done. I saw no need to tinker today.

And, at the third time of asking, I’ve managed to paint something in 2026 that is worth putting up for sale. The price can be found here. The darks might be a bit too hard edged in places but the combination of cool shadows and warm lit areas make this one look really hot. Some people might look at this painting and see someone who’s had a tomato based pasta sauce poured over their chest and lap but each to their own. Stories are good anyway.