“The Champions”
Step 7
Over the last week, I’ve finished all of the flesh tones on the female champion painting. I’m going to warn you beforehand, because of the sharp drop off of light across the figure and the fact that none of the drapery is painted to give context to the lights and darks at different points, things may looks a little weird at this point. But, I assure you, it will all come together in the end. Either that or I’ll end up repainting the legs. I am betting on the first.
Because the high contrast and wet paint are so difficult to photograph, here are a couple of detail shots to give you a better idea of how the painting actually looks. First a close-up of the figure’s left arm, the most brightly lit area in the painting:
And second, a close-up of the legs, the least brightly lit area:
For next time, I’ll be working on finishing all of the remaining flesh tones on the male champion. Check back and see how it turns out!
September 1st, 2012 at 7:23 pm
Thank you, Bryan! We love your contributions to the QCFA Artist’s Studio.
September 2nd, 2012 at 8:16 am
Bryan, how do you decide which parts of the painting to paint first?
September 2nd, 2012 at 8:37 am
Thanks for the great question!
Sometimes it’s a simple as picking the area that looks like the most fun, but often I’m deciding what to work on for pretty practical reasons. In general, I like to work from back to front. By that I mean I paint the background elements first and make my way to the foreground. This just saves me the trouble of carefully painting around the edged of finished foreground objects. With simple compositions like these two where there really is no background, I will make an exception and paint the figure first, but I still go back to front with respect to overlapping areas as much as possible. This is the main, but not only reason why I’m saving the drapery until all the flesh tones are finished. I also almost always start with the face because I find a body-less face on the canvas slightly less disturbing than a headless body.
I also like to work from right to left if I can. The only reason is that I’m a lefty, and moving that direction tends to keep my hand out of the wet paint.
More recently I have also discovered that I am much more efficient if I paint all of one type of thing at once, while I’m ‘in the groove’. For example, I’m painting all of the flesh tones at once on both paintings…then I’ll be painting all of the drapery. This really speeds me up and I think I get better results, particularly when I’m working on multiple canvasses.