Zaza

I’m back on the Artgraf paints today for a number of reasons.  It’s pouring with rain outside for a start.  And I’m a little bit distracted by the World Championship chess, so I don’t want to be using some medium that requires 100% of my attention.  Finally, I have two pages left in my watercolour block and they’re a bit detached from the cardboard underneath, so might buckle if I used normal watercolours on them.  And I’m in the mood for something different.  So let’s get started.

It’s a debut for Zaza as model, in a pose that I might be able to get away with posting on LinkedIn.  During my outward daily walk today I hit upon the idea of masking out stripes along Zaza’s body.  Then on the way back I started thinking about having some refracting bands going across the painting.  So these bands would be at one angle on the left, a second angle along the body and back to the original angle on the right.  Rather than have solid white bands across the painting, I thought I’d colour one set of bands on the body and the other set on the background.  Sounds like a plan.

So I put down a grid of guidelines, then sketched in the outline of the body and masked out stripes with masking tape.  I added some colour by picking up the dry Artgraf pans and using them to make marks.  I tried to vaguely use yellows on the right and in the highlights and blue in the shadows and on the right.  Reds I added everywhere.  For the towel, I started by putting on lots of earthy colours, then added a little bit of the primaries here and there.  Here’s how things were looking at this stage:

Next came the exciting bit: the addition of water.  After learning from previous attempts, I was extra careful today.  I used a small flat brush and only performed very short strokes, trying to restrict them to individual colour areas wherever possible, before adding water where colours met and encouraging them to mix.  I also did my usual thing of trying to sculpt the body shapes and contours with my brushstrokes.  It’s maybe worth mentioning here that a big side benefit of masking out stripes was that I could work on the body one area at a time without having to worry about the opposing issues of not wanting hard edges to dry while also not wanting to paint too quickly and mix all the colours together.

After the body was dry, I worked on the background stripes.  Rather than masking these out with tape, I used a ruler as a mask, putting yellow ochre along the top of the stripes and dark brown along the bottom.  I then bridged the gap between these two earthy colours with sepia and brown everywhere, and then put in odd primary colour mark for a bit of variety.  And then I painted water over the background stripes and that was me done.

So what do I think of this one?  I’ll start with the summary.  It’s a success and is up for sale.  The colours are great and I think I’ve finally managed to use the Artgraf colours properly.

But then there are the stripes.  My refracting bands are a bit jarring because (i) they don’t line up on the left and the right, and (ii) they’re of varying widths, depending on what the angle is of the edge where they meet the body.  I’m planning on doing a similar painting tomorrow but this time (i) I’ll start off with the background bands, making them all horizontal, identically sized and equally spaced, and then (ii) for the bands across the body, I’ll use bendy lines to accentuate the three dimensional body shape.  I’ll still have the thinner bands on the body and the thicker ones in the background.  I may even use this same Zaza pose after it went so well today.