Friday, July 13, 2007

Watch the Artist, Part Six




The painting stages have officially ended. But, it's not finished. I'm sure some artists would leave it here and say they want to allow it to have that "painterly effect." Or, I could take a few more steps and many more hours of painstaking detail work to finish the hands, feet, face and background in acrylic. However, those parts are going to require a lot of detail and I've never been a fan of working with brushes the size of an eyelash.


I said from the beginning this would be a piece of artwork that combined prismacolor pencil with acrylic. I feel a lot more comfortable with doing the detail work in prismacolor because I like the control I have with the pencil.


In this last painting stage it was all about drybrushing and evening out the rough edges. I mixed a very neutral beige color using mostly white gesso and burnt umber. Just for the sake of harmony I added a generous portion of the original skin tone color. When I felt comfortable with the smoothness of the edges I mixed a bright yellowish white to added some sheen with highlights. As you see, I replaced that awful yellow foreground with a neutral grayish blue.


I'll varnish it again and get started with the pencil work. Please be patient and give me a few days to work on this next part. I'm sure I'll become very obsessive compulsive about the detail. Let me know what you think so far.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Alan,

What a wonderful piece of work!! Thank you for showing us the steps along the way. You have such a wonderful gift and look forward to what you will have next.