The Return Of Jazmine

So today, I’m drawing two nudes.  First up is a second appearance for Jazmine..  She’s a woman of colour and I can see all sorts of reds and greens in her skintones, making her a great subject.  For colours, I started with bark, baked earth leaf green, Shiraz, iris blue and mustard.  I played it light with the bark, not wanting big, dark shadows.  But things came out too light.  I need to remember that baked earth is quite a light, orange colour and not the burnt sienna clone that I keep thinking it is.

So with things being too light, I put on some outlines in bark, the first time I’ve added outlines in ages.  I was in too much of a hurry, see?  To try to hide the outlines and add some much needed dark values, I risked a second coat of pencils.  I darkened all the left facing edges with indigo and all the right facing edges in violet.

The second coat was actually an improvement.  But things still weren’t quite right.  The indigo and violet weren’t really “connecting with” the first coat.  So I added a third coat.  I put some fuchsia next to the indigo and some iris blue next to the violet.  And some mustard between that fuchsia and blue, sometimes with empty white in the middle of the mustard.

Again, this was improvement.  The painting was still far from perfect but any more fiddling would have made it worse.

This is a pretty bad painting.  Its only redeeming feature is the rainbow colours in Jazmine’s abdomen.  But there’s so much that’s bad about it:

– the hard edge on the violet mark on Jazmine’s abdomen

– the still visible outlines

– the hair, something that’s been going well recently in figure drawings, not great today

– whatever those things are on the ends of her arms (they’re not hands)

– just about everything else

This is terrible.  I’m glad I have another painting to do today.  It’s already outlined in pencil.  I really need to go lightly on the inks on this one.