Quent Cordair Fine Art

The pants offered many of the same challenges as the shirt but seemed a little more subtle geometrically which made them harder to paint. Once again, I painted the mid-tones and shadows beneath the largest folds first, then went back over with increasingly lighter tones to add the smaller, more delicate details. One trick with fabric is to notice the characteristic shapes it makes when folded. Thin smooth fabric (like the pants and shirt in this case) tends to create sharp, linear folds and very geometrical shapes. Heavy fabric like wool sweaters or velvet forms softer, more rounded shapes.

As anxious as I was now getting to finish the figure, I realized that I should paint the grass behind her first. I started at the top, and used a medium sized liner brush to paint in individual blade shapes in horizontal groups, alternating back and forth between a lighter color and a shadow color. Once a large area was filled, I would then go back and add accent details to a few blades along with a few areas of extreme highlight and shadow. For the most part it was easier than I had anticipated. As with the shirt, the grass pulled together a lot of loose ends but the most rewarding effect was that it pushed the plane into the background enough for the figure to begin to seem in scale with it.

Painting close fitting clothing can be deceptively tricky. A few wrinkles out of place, and the figure can look a bit misshapen underneath. That said, I really enjoyed painting the shirt because it seemed to pull a lot of loose ends together, and effectively completed the top half of the canvas. The more primer is covered by finished painting, the more the colors begin to work together. When I first started painting in oils, I struggled with light colored items, especially whites. The shadow areas always looked muddy, and the highlights never really very white. It seems obvious now, but what I had failed to observe was that looking at a white shirt, even the darkest shadows are far from black and the mid-tones reflect the colors around them much more than you would think. I started mixing the colors on the light side, and reserving the darker tones until the item was all but finished. I found that often I didn’t even use the darkest few shades on the palette. To avoid the muddiness, I switched from trying to work darks into lights to working lights into darks. Titanium white (if you use a good brand of paint) is actually strong enough to overpower a lot of other pigments.

As discussed earlier, it is generally easier to paint back to front when working with oils. Since the blouse overlaps the arms I painted them next using the same basic technique as I had on the face.

I am never quite satisfied with the face until I get the hair painted. I have used several different approaches to painting hair, but in this case I painted in the deep shadows first, leaving the areas of mid-tone empty. Then I painted in the basic hair colors and the highlights.

I was planning on working on the blouse next, so I painted in the flesh tones on the exposed midriff.