The day's not over and I have gone for one more painting! While my mind…
Luana
The builders have finished work today and I have access to the studio again. After a break of a couple of weeks, I was expecting my first couple of paintings to be writeoffs, so there’s no excuse for not kicking off with an experiment. And with the last two pages in my cold pressed watercolour block pulling away from the board behind them, the Artgraf blocks are calling. If I used watercolour on these two loose sheets they’d buckle all over the place.
After reading the Patrick Jones book on figure drawing, I wanted to try out some gestural figure drawing, so I chose a pose by Luana in which I could see tomorrow three big swooping gestures. And then what I did today was:
– get down a pencil outline using the grid method
– add some yellow, blue and reds with big swooshing gestures, following gestures in the figure but ignoring outlines and swooshing through the background as well as the figure
– wet the marks carefully with a brush in selected places. I did this in all the darkest places and got something looking pretty good. I really should have stopped here but instead I carried on.
– wet the marks indiscriminately with a wet kitchen towel, following big swooshing gesture lines in the background and over the figure.
– wet any dry bits left in the figure to give it more presence
– went over again with the kitchen paper making gestural swooshes
– fiddled a little in places, wetting the brush, picking up pigment from the blue and yellow chunks and strengthening bits of the figure
And that was me done.
The thing about experiments is that they never fail and you always learn something. Today I learnt that only wetting the odd bit of the body might make an interesting painting. I learned that swooshing with wet kitchen paper doesn’t produce good looking marks. And I was reminded that I really need to apply minimal pigment to the paper with these Artgraf blocks. As a painting, though, a clear failure.
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