Michaela II

Too much on this week. And even with nothing on today, I don’t feel liberated enough to spend a few hours on a landscape or portrait, so it’s a day for figure painting with the inktense pencils. Today’s model is Michaela, someone who’s been in the spotlight here once before.

Colour-wise, I shunned the indigo for once and went for an analogous scheme of Persian Red, fuchsia, violet and bright blue but also threw in leaf green for something different. Not quite a split complementary scheme as the analogous set is centered on violet, which isn’t directly opposite green.

I started with violet in the vary darkest places, with no help from the Notanizer app. After that, I added the blue and the reds wherever it felt appropriate, gradually introducing midtones and making the darks darker. I added the greens at the end in a few places to create contrasts and mixes. Throughout this first stage process, I was putting blues and reds down randomly, hoping that wetting the pigment would bring up some colourful surprises. And it was partway through doing this that I realised I was enjoying myself too much and treating this like a coloured pencil painting, jamming away with multiple colours and too many layers. My next painting may well be a long overdue coloured pencil figure. I can feel it.

Next was, of course, the wetting stage, going over all the pencil marks with a waterbrush. To encourage colours to mix, I tried doing what I do with Artgraf paintings, dotting or stroking bits of water all over the place in random patterns and hoping they would blend together.

The final result? Interesting. My scattered wetting technique has resulted in a few cauliflowers and I’ve applied too much of the violet, hiding a lot of the blue and the reds. But I like the random bits of red, blue and green and the lost edge around the bottom of Michaela’s diaphragm. This one has its merits and is going up for sale, with the price to be found here.