After a few weeks away following the loss of my father, I'm back to the…
Sarah Ann, Pensive
It’s just too hot outside to paint this week, so I’ll be having a run on the inktense pencils. Today I picked a pose by Sarah Ann, someone I’ve painted in oil pastels before. This might even be based on the same pose. I didn’t even check the model’s identity before starting, though, so didn’t know I’d painted her before and the similarity in colour schemes is a huge coincidence.
I quite liked how my most recent painting turned out. The leaf green, baked earth and willow produced together a very realistic, flesh-coloured set of colours but we’re maybe a bit lacking in darker values. So today I started with bark in the shadows, supplementing this with leaf green, baked earth and willow. Oh, and mustard too. But I wanted things to be a tiny bit more interesting, so tried to add some poppy red and iris blue in places. But I went a bit overboard with these colours and soon decided this would be a multicoloured painting it’s little or no white showing. The red and blue at this stage were so bountiful that I thought I’d add a little teal green in places for interest. And a bit of violet in the shadows because I was now on tilt. I went all over the painting covering up all the white on the figure, even using my original fleshy colours in places. Here’s what I ended up with before I added any water:
Once I’d added the water, I thought the resulting painting was a bit too green and that the shadows were a bit too light. So after a lunch break, which I thought was long enough for everything to dry, I put some more bark in the shadows and added more of the poppy red in places to offset the green. The water hadn’t dried completely in places and my red pencil left inky marks rather than pencil marks but you’ll only spot these if you know they’re there. I noticed that my first wetting of the pencil marks had left some textured effects in places, so thought I’d add to these by dropping on some tiny drips of water. These only resulted in the one cauliflower mark at the top of Sarah Ann’s left thigh.
Overall, the painting is interesting and clearly identifiable as mine. But the shadows ended up a bit too dark and there was something that doesn’t look right about either Sarah Ann’s right leg or abdomen or both. I managed to solve these problems by cropping off the painting at the bottom but I’m still not putting this one in the shop window because I don’t know whether I’d be able to find an off the shelf frame for the cropped version.
Here’s what the uncropped version looked like. Pretty horrible, isn’t it?
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