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The new painting is done, yay! Actually, i finished it Monday night. It might have even been Sunday had i not been running so much fever. I got sick Thursday and ran fever for a good four days straight. Sunday night i was trying to work on the lines and i was shivering too much to work. I wound up getting the rest done Monday while i sat on the floor with a space heater pointed at me.
It’s been hard to get a good picture of the painting, but this captures the colors pretty closely. I used only burnt umber, burnt sienna, white and black. The shadow on the face oddly turned out to be this shaded flesh tone, which wasn’t exactly what i was intending, but i thought it was ironic that i mixed such a good dark flesh tone with no “fleshy” colors. I’ll have to remember for future reference, though — trying to mix a good color for shaded flesh tones is pretty difficult. No more! I tweaked this photo of the painting just a bit to get the colors closer to what they are in actuality. The dark brown is about 2/3 burnt umber and 1/3 burnt sienna, which is lighter, with an orangish hue and more of a radiance. It took two coats to really cover the canvas, but it gave it a really nice depth that’s just hinted at in the section above kim’s shoulder in this photo.
The only thing that i’m a little disappointed in is the thickness in the lines of the face and eyes. It’s kinda hard to know what a 1-point stroke in illustrator is going to translate to on a 3′x5′ canvas, but i think the lines are a bit too thick, losing a little detail. To some extent, i’m starting to think that, unless i start buying REALLY big canvases, I’m going to have to deal with the fact that the lines lose a bit of nuance in the translation from digital to analog. That said, I think the painting came out almost precise to the original line drawing.
One of my favorite parts is the shadow in the couch that comes up on that fold, like a flower… or a piece of popcorn. I tried to be conscious of how the shape is formed. If you look, the shape of the “stem” is repeated in two places — the shadow under her right collar bone, under the sweater, and the shadow across the forehead and down the bridge of her nose. And of course, the popcorn or flower shape is repeated on the other side of the couch. I should have made the shadows of the neck a bit more elegant, I think, but in all I think there’s just enough going on to draw you away from those eyes and around the rest of the piece for just a few seconds.
My last thought on this is that her expression in the painting seems to lose a slight bit of the seriousness that she has in the original photo. Here she looks a bit more friendly, or curious… and i’m not sure if that’s good or not.