One Rainy Wish

July is looking like a slow month. There’s just too much sun at the moment; I get back from my morning walk and I’m to trashed to paint. This is only my third painting in three days but I had to do something. Being so drained of energy, I took things easy and went for a figure painting with the inktense pencils. Today’s model is CasD, making her third appearance.

I was in the mood for multiple colours, so I started with wild flame, Persian red, fuchsia, violet, iris blue, bright blue, deep indigo, sea blue and leaf green, starting with the indigo and violet in the darkest places but otherwise adding colours wherever they felt right. I gradually drifted towards jamming mode, ending up randomly moving around the paper without thinking much. Was this artistic genius, reaching a new level of consciousness or was it just laziness on my part? You can be the judge. Towards the end I introduced three more colours, trying to lighten the highlights with mustard and antique white and adding the odd little bit of of green in places just for shock value.

Next I wet the colours. I started with the darkest shadows, looking for some hard edges, and them moved on to everything else, looking to create some three dimensionality in places. And some of those brush marks definitely worked.

But I still felt a bit underwhelmed at the end. I’ve painted too many similar paintings to this one. The colours are interesting but at really should have left some white highlights – I wasn’t 100% there today. So I decided to make a radical change and drew in some outlines with the black brush pen from my fineliner set. It wasn’t as if I had anything to lose. I didn’t just follow the outlines of the paint but nipped and tucked in places to improve the outline. And that was me done.

I’m not putting this one up for sale. The black outlines haven’t rescued it and have probably made things worse. The pencil tones aren’t heavy enough to complement the outlines. But at least I had a go rather than snoozing in the sun.