Thea 6

A first go with charcoal this year. Today’s subject is Thea, making her sixth appearance, hence the unimaginative name of this one. I was shocked, though, to discover that this is the third of those six to be in exactly the same pose. The two earlier ones (this and this) were from a different direction though.

I wanted to try out some of the ideas in the Juliette Aristides book. I didn’t give it the full Monty though, starting with a grid rather than with Juliette’s action lines. Maybe I should have taken the risk with the action lines because it looks as if my drafting’s off a bit somewhere. Anyway, once I had a rough outline down, I did try out some of Juliette’s ideas. I started by dividing the figure into shadow and light areas and shading in all the shadows. Everything looked really good at this point. Then I added a thick dark black area along the border between the dark and light: this would be the terminator or core shadow. And I added similar dark bits of occluded shadow in the right spots where 3D shapes touched each other

And then the rest of the painting was all about the mid tones. I darkened the rest of the shadow side slightly, then tried to blend the shadows together from the dark core and occluded shadows to the lightest shadows furthest from the light. For the light side, I didn’t add any more charcoal but blended the terminator into the light.

And everything else was just tinkering. Making bits darker or lighter, blending values, adding a dark background to contrast against the highlights. Even using a putty eraser to remove charcoal to make highlights lighter and to adjust Thea’s shape in a couple of places where my charcoal marks had started to stray outside their planned boundaries. And that was it really.

While this this one’s not a huge flop, I don’t think it’s good enough to go in the shop window. The drafting’s slightly out, the hand is undeveloped and values haven’t been smoothed out enough for my liking – I don’t like the big flat dark areas on the stomach and right arm in particular. The one high spot for me is the face, one of the better faces in my figure paintings.