I'm taking it a bit easy today, just going for a quick figure painting with…
Michael, Hot And Cold
After a couple of days off I’m back in action today. But with a family do on tomorrow, I don’t want to start a coloured pencil portrait and have to take a big break in the middle. So I’ve gone back to the inktense pencils for some figure drawing. Let’s see whether that has advanced as much as my marker drawings have. Today’s model is Michael and I think this is his third appearance.
The pencil drawing was pretty straightforward. I used a grid but I’m starting to wonder whether I should just go freehand for figures. It’s not as if there are loads of different shapes or that getting a feature in slightly the wrong place will ruin the likeness.
Then I went on to colours. I started with indigo, wanting a strong chiaroscuro base underlying everything. Then I added in some other colours just for a bit of variety and temperature variation. So there’s Shiraz on the left and iris blue and teal green on the right. Hot and cold. Here’s what I ended up with before adding any water:
Once this was all done, I added the water. As usual, I started with a small brush in the most detailed areas before going larger. I tried to paint from lighter areas into darker and to sculpt my strokes along body contours. One thing I did today that I usually forget to do is to think about the edges of the shapes. I deliberately have hard rather than soft edges for genuine edges of shapes (as opposed to form shadows on surfaces that are curbing away). In particular, there’s the shadow along the left side of Michael’s right thigh: the left edge of the shadow is hard where we can see the edge of his torso but the right edge is soft where it’s all about the curve along the thigh.
The final painting has ended up a bit more colourful than the indigo with subtle hints of temperature than I was expecting but still looks good. The edges have generally worked well but there are places where I’d rather they were harder, like around the edge of Michael’s left foot. And his left firearm should probably be a bit thicker. But there’s a lot to like in so many other places with the brush marks and the temperature variations. Michael’s up for sale.
Now to see whether I can get away with posting this one on LinkedIn.
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