Today's been quite a short day but, with England playing cricket tomorrow, I didn't want…
Thea In Artgraf
Yeah, too much other stuff going on in my life at the moment for me to be able to fully immerse myself in watercolours but I had a creative thought during yesterday’s walk that I wanted to try out. With the Artgraf colours, the trick is to not make long brushstrokes with water because the pigments are so strong that a long stroke just carries the colour along the stroke and hides all the other colours that you were hoping blend in. In my previous two Artgrafs, my solution was to divide to the paper into little areas that I could work in separately. But then when I was breathing in the fresh Kent air yesterday I thought why not just do really short strokes everywhere and end up with a painting made up of lots of tiny rectangular brushmarks? I’m not sure but original idea was probably to have overlapping brushmarks rather than a mosaic effect. And I was thinking more about painting landscapes than about painting figures. But I don’t always follow the plan.
Today’s model was Thea, making her third, no fourth appearance on this blog. I deliberately chose a back view so that I could have a big shape in which to practice restricting myself to small shapes. The colours all went on first and then I applied the water in short strokes. The strikes weren’t rectangular everywhere: I tried in places to sculpt the body with the edges of the mark shapes. Here’s what I ended up with at that point:
Had I thought this to be a perfect painting, I’d have stopped at this point. Absolutely no question. I was still in an experimental mood, though, so thought I’d carry on and see whether a bit more work could improve things. So I had a go at calming down the mosaic effect. For the hair and face I painted all over with water, trying to get colours to run together. And for the rest of the body I applied water to the gaps between tiles and tried to coax them to join up.
And that was me done. I think that, if anything, the earlier version looks better. The blue shadows down Thea’s left side don’t clash as much with the rest of her body in the tiled version. On the other hand, I like the accidental Spider-Man hints on her right forearm in the final version. Should I have added a background? I think not: the background would need to be understated and Artgrafs don’t do understated: if they’re not full on, they just look unfinished and sketchy. Anyway, I think this one’s good enough for now to go in the shop window.
And, yes this is Thea’s fourth appearance. I thought this pose looked familiar. I’d drawn it before and given credit to the wrong model. The original post has now been corrected.
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