Tuesday 5 April 2011

Grappling with the colours



Further progress has been made on my Redwall painting, some to my satisfaction and some maybe not so. The top photo shows the first layer of watercolour which establishes the colours for most of the items surrounding Brian (the mouse).

The image above (yesterdays effort) is firmly in the ugly stage which at the moment I am struggling to break out of. The second and third layers of watercolour have gone down and I have started to dabble with gouache on the writing desk. Note I have left the bookshelf in the first stage of watercolour, this is mainly because I am undecided as to how deeply the chair shadow will interact with the books behind. I have plowed ahead with the other elements to create a point of value reference. I think its much easier to split a painting like this into sections and work on each bit until its nearly finished. That way you can take a complicated image one step at a time, however when it comes to vast open landscapes I tend to slap the paint about and hope for the best!

At the end of yesterdays work I was in a bit of a grump. Nothing seemed to be working very well and I had spotted lots of problems in the drawing like the eyes for example. However all was not lost because that evening I had a lovely curry in my belly and we had a friend over to see us after gallivanting around New Zealand, Australia and China :-)

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