To start this painting I made a series of studies and thumbnails to organise my thoughts with regard to colour, composition, brush mark and tonal values. Examples of these follow:
I then made a full scale drawing in charcoal, once again to organise the tonal values and ensure that I knew intimately the detail of the subject and its placement in the space. The size of the canvas to be used was 1800mm x 1500mm and the paper corresponded exactly to this.
Partially finished charcoal drawing.
Details of Charcoal drawing.
Finished Charcoal drawing.
The next stage was to do a full scale painting on paper. The medium used is student acrylic Aquacryl. I chose to use this as it is firstly cheap and secondly I could manipulate it easily, although there were some problems with transparency and cracking. To overcome the cracking a binder was at first used and then a gel medium, although the gel appeared to have a slight yellowish cast.
Finally I drafted up the image on the canvas, using a light toning of the background paint hue, after putting a base coat of burnt umber with a pthalo wash over. Paint was applied using loose direct brush marks, placement of paint as fresh as possible, no overworking. The full range of tones was mixed prior to starting and the background was left until later.
Details of the brush marks and working of the background are shown below.
No comments:
Post a Comment