Friday 22 February 2013

Life Drawing - Oils in 40 Minutes.

Well, today I'm cheating as I painted this at yesterday's life drawing session. But I didn't get the chance to photograph it yesterday so here we are.

It was painted in two twenty minute blocks - a long pose, which this particular group is quite keen on. You may notice it is the same pose as the watercolour, but from a different position - looking down and from behind rather than from the floor and on her right. Long poses are great as they give me time to paint but bad as it tends to lead to static poses, often lying down. As I am mainly sit on the floor (shoulder problems means that using an easel is difficult) this means I often get very foreshortened views. Luckily not yesterday - partly as I got the use of a table, so could paint standing up.

The board was pre-painted with leftovers of the palette - from this painting I suspect - which enables me to go straight in with the darks and the lights - a technique I developed first in watercolours. The mid-tones are then added on and in this one I wanted to exagerrate the difference between neutrals and brights - so pushed the reds. This was an experiment but may well feed back into my other paintings.

Which is why I go to life drawing - to try things out. Success!

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