The Caper Spurge Fairy is beginning to come to life….
Ok, so when I said there wouldn’t be a huge range of colour in this painting, I think I was forgetting a few things… like the fact that I tend to just layer on washes of colour because it’s fun and not because it’s actually the right colour 🙂
So I have begun the ‘colouring-in’ stage of this painting:
Having first done the shading part of the under-painting (see previous post), I am adding a basic colour on top. Most of this layer of paint ends up being washed off, but it must be put on thick at this stage, because after that, this happeneds:
…the thickness of each layer of paint stops the wrong colour bleeding through where I don’t want it (mostly).
And now, most of the paint has been washed off again, and you can see my original ‘shading’ underneath:
Ah… now I recall I said the fairy’s outfit was going to be black, because it has to be a little latex number. I think it still may be black, but I realized that if I painted black over the entire garment, I really would loose most of my blue under-painting and those white highlights. So this is (again) something of an experiment. I think I might add some black washes on top and see how it comes out! Or I might decide to like the white… either way, I’ll let you know soon.
So, after some hours again:
The painting has taken on a more softened look, after some hours spent slowly adding thin washes of colour. It was really hard to photograph this and this picture still doesn’t pick up the subtle whitish veil that lays across a lot of the painting, but it’s as near as I can get it. When the painting is finished, I hope the scan will be more truthful to the actual painting than the camera, but for now, try to imagine it’s not quite as lurid as it looks, particularly the luminous green at the top.
So, now I have to get down to work on a few details…
Art by Nancy Farmer 