A new painting, which always excites me. The model for this work is one of my life models who has such wonderful skin to paint and a natural grace when she poses for the life drawing class that I run. I asked if she would come to the studio and model for me in various settings that I had in mind. In the end she had her own ideas as well, and we came up with some brilliant poses which will feature in future paintings – and in fact already have. With this work I wanted to convey the woman of today, confident, happy in her own skin, hard working etc. She has had a good day at work and is relaxing with a glass of wine before she goes out possibly. Or this could be her workwear and she is knackered and just wants her downtime. The hands behind the head are so that she can be just thinking her own thoughts, reflecting on her day, or wondering on the evening ahead. Or just listening to some cool music. Sometimes, as I have said before in one of my blogs, cropping a painting works well. The viewer does not…
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I am immensely grateful to a follower on Twitter who told me they thought the shoulders were too broad and the legs too short for this woman. I get so involved with my work, I can’t always see errors that are glaringly obvious to anyone looking at the painting for the first time. So I pass on another tip for what it is worth. Always, if you can, get someone else to peer over your shoulder at your work. A fresh pair of eyes is always good and first impressions are usually correct. Constructive criticism is always helpful (so my tutor used to tell me….) I had already made the arms smaller than from the original photo, but could now see more work needed doing and I have altered them accordingly. The reason the legs looked short to this viewer was that I had got so involved in painting the hair that I was adding more and more brushstrokes, hence an overlarge head of hair and little legs! I have taken away some of the hair and now feel happy with the result. A little more fine tuning of the paintings and I was done. I will not be putting…
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So I sat down this week with my my Ipod Shuffle plugged in (yes it does still exist) and turned up the volume on the Rolling Stones and off I went.. I never seem to learn that is better to approach the painting of the flesh ONCE I have been experimenting and gaining confidence with other parts of a painting. Painting flesh tones is notoriously difficult, at least for me and needs to be approached with caution! A skirt is blue, shoes are red etc., but flesh is pink, blue, purple, yellow ochre etc etc etc and I always, always get it wrong first time around. As I did this time – again. Anyway, with Mick and Keith in the background I calmed down and got the flesh tones going again AFTER painting the picture frames etc. I do like adding in my touches of blue and pink to the skin as it adds interest. Talking of which, I have set myself a really hard task putting my paintings into the picture. For a start they are unframed, so have had to imagine the frames (with a little help from Google) and then how much detail do I put into…
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