The Face Of Harakbut

This is the Face Of Harakbut. It’s in the Amazon rainforest, somewhere in Peru. Nobody knows whether it’s manmade or a natural rock formation. It was just crying out to be painted and I thought it would suit the M Graham paints.

There’s not much to say about the technique, I put down a pencil outline, then a very light underpainting. After that I just kept adding layers of paint, trying to get more detail in each layer. One thing I tried to do was to make the biggest value contrast the one down the front of the face. I’ve got the background behind the face suitably dark but the face itself isn’t as light as I’d have liked, probably because I was having too much fun dabbing in the yellow, brown and blue wet into wet to vary the colour temperatures. I ended up trying to lighten the face and create some texture by applying the titanium white trick: painting on watery titanium white and dabbing it off with kitchen paper. It did create some texture but didn’t lighten the colours as much as I wanted it to. But I stopped there as any more tinkering with the painting would only make things worse.

I think it’s an OK painting and worth putting up for sale. I’m finding it a challenge to create paintings using only a blue, a brown, a green, a violet and yellow ochre but I’m enjoying it, and it results in yet another different style of painting for me.