The Cheetah Woman

After the painting experiment two days ago that I unwrapped yesterday, I had an overnight think and decided that I was going to press ahead and turn the abstract into the cheetah woman.  Here’s what I did today:

– I masked out the cheetah woman with masking tape!  Crazy idea but there were straight lines in the painting already and I wanted more.  There’s a nice positively painted negative triangle between the head and the supporting arm.

– Negatively painted the cheetah woman using the French ultramarine along the bottom.  I decided to let this blue also go into the white band below it, which I later regretted.

–  Negatively painted her along the top, initially in raw sienna.  I swept the strokes upwards to look like grasses.  The raw sienna was looking a bit monotone, so I added in the viridian, ultramarine and quinacridone magenta in places.  I was careful not to negatively paint the feet, not just because that would have been difficult but also because odd lost edge is good.

– Tried drawing tree branches in the top right and top left with masking fluid for variety and painting over them.  These didn’t really work out right, so I painted some foliage over them.  This also covered a lot of the white band in the top left.

– Added the usual finishing touches: lots of salt in the foliage, grass and shadows.  If it works, great.  If it doesn’t, then not a disaster.  And, because things were looking a bit dull and dark, I spatttered over my usual opaques: cadmium red, cadmium yellow, cerulean blue and titanium white.  I was careful to cover up the cheetah woman while doing the spattering.

– And at the end of all this, the thing I was most disappointed with was the former white bands that were now painted over but still visible.  They looked like a mistake that I was trying to disguise.  So I painted over them with titanium white to bring them back.  But they still didn’t look quite right, looking like bands for the sake of bands.  So I encouraged them to bleed downwards into the paint below, in what turned out to be quite pleasing patterns.  And I added a touch of ultramarine because white with a bit of blue shadow looks whiter than white on its own.

So, job done.  Is it better than its abstract predecessor?  I don’t know and don’t really want to think about that anyway.  Is it any good?  Well I say it is.  It’s crazy bonkers.  There are so many questions that this painting raises.  What is that leopard woman thing?  Does it have legs or does it have the body of a worm or a fish?  Is that grass behind it or flames?  What are the white bands?  Wooden beams?  Something covered in snow?  What are those cabbage lines?  What’s that spotty triangle in the top left corner?  And do I have this painting the right way round?  I’ve not even looked at the other three orientations.

This one was gifted to my sister in law.