Susan

After putting down an initial drawing with the aid of a grid, I added some colour with the pencils.  I started with just bark and left green and made a special effort today to be quite light with the pencils, looking to get something classy and understated.  It’s a thin line, though, between classy and understated and washed out like the England ODI team and, after wearing the pencil marks, it was pretty clear to me that this one handed ended up on the wrong side.

So I put on another layer of colour.  I tried to darken the darkest bits with charcoal grey and then added iris blue, poppy red and Shiraz wherever I thought the painting needed some livening up.  And then I wet the pencil marks, and that was me done.

As always, an interesting little exercise.  The right shoulder and right thigh don’t look quite right but the colours are interesting.  So are the marks.  This looks like watercolour so people will look at those marks wondering how much of their character is down to my control and how much is down to me getting lucky when the paint just did its thing.  But these are inktense pencils and I really have much more control over the marks than you might think.  They’re a bit of a cheat code.  Anyway, this is interesting enough to go in the shop window.