Deliberation: Step 4
My next move was to do a little more under-painting, this time for the legs. I worked on the figure’s right leg first, the one in the back mostly obscured by skirt and the left hand. I started off fighting the paint a bit as I had with the arm. I was having difficulty controlling the transparency of the burnt umber mixture as I blended it into the thin layer of turpentine and burnt umber I had applied to the whole area. Keep in mind… this is a technique I had only used twice before. Once on the arm, that had been equally difficult, and once on the face, that had been an experiment and somewhat of an accidental discovery. By the time I started in on the under-painting for the left leg, however, I had figured out a few things. I did away with the first wash coat entirely and painted by building up areas of darker value with gradual additions of pigment. It was slow going at first, but the control was incomparably better and I got a lot faster. The left leg ended up taking roughly two thirds as long to block in as the right, even given its larger area and higher level of complexity.
By now the arm was dry enough for the over-painting. As I had with the face, I started by applying a very thin, transparent and almost colorless wash of burnt umber, turpentine and linseed oil over the entire arm. Then I mixed a string of flesh tones from titanium white, burnt umber, yellow ochre and cadmium red, and gradually worked the colors into the glaze layer, allowing the paint to remain translucent in the transition to the shadow areas and almost transparent in the shadows themselves often leaving the under-painting showing through. Only in the most direct light did I put down an opaque layer of paint. The glaze made blending exceedingly easy, and I was able to adjust the hues and chroma (color intensity) of the flesh tones on-the-fly right on the canvas as I went along. It was a little harried at first, but good practice, especially as I knew I would have to eventually do the same thing with the large section of continuous skin on the left leg, and it would have to be done in one sitting before the glaze layer began to tack up…around 7 hours at the outside. No pressure.
But first the under-painting on the legs would have to dry. In the mean time I worked on the skirt. The light shining through the fabric made for really fun painting. I started in the back (in relation to the picture plane) where the effect of the translucence was the most pronounced.
Next I moved on to the front section, starting on the right to keep my hand away from the fresh paint as I moved along.
And finally I finished with the hem along the edge of the skirt.
Tags: Bryan Larsen, Deliberation
