Icarus: Step 18
Well, there’s not a whole lot off-hand to add to what I’ve already said while I finish up the rest of the figure’s flesh, so let’s see what tidbits I can pull out of my Felix bag of painter’s knowledge to make Step 18 slightly longer than the average fortune cookie prophecy.
Well, for starters, it’s easier to paint smaller portions of flesh, as you can imagine, so the exposed parts of the body that remain to be painted from Step 17 are all pretty simple work. While working on the flesh for a single figure, it’s important to use the same colors for each area. If you mix colors to paint one area, then try to remix them all from scratch each time you start a new area, the result can be a figure with the aspect of, say, the tanning salon equivalent to Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, as one arm or hand may be a slightly different color than the next.
When flesh painting work spans 2 or more days, I keep my palette in a mini-fridge to help keep the paint from drying. I will sometimes have to remix colors if they’ve begun to dry, or if I’m running short on them. I’ll always keep a small amount of each color in reserve before using it all up so I can refer to it for exact color matching if I need to remix it. This is a lot more accurate than the alternative method of blindly guessing, as you might expect.
The left hand of Icarus I’ve outlined in a dark color after painting it, which makes it look a little bit funny at this stage. This is because it overlaps the drapery he’s wearing. By outlining the hand, I’m giving myself a small margin where I can paint up to the hand while working on the drapery, without actually painting over any of the work I’ve already done. It’s basically a trick for creating an even, blended-looking transition between the drapery and the hand.
As I said before, it’s important to get all your flesh painting done with the same colors. And although my usual method is to paint from far to near (which means painting flesh before painting the clothes that adorn it), there are times such as this when a bit of flesh overlaps the clothes and forces me to break from my far-to-near strategy. This is because if I waited until after the drapery was painted to go back and do the hand, all my flesh colors would have dried and I’d have created an annoying amount of additional work for myself to remix my flesh palette. And I find that “annoying” and “additional work” seldom describe things that appeal to me.
Why paint far to near? With the way that I (and many other realists) apply paint, things look much more natural if the paint of closer objects overlaps the paint of distant ones. So without the outline around the hand, which I’ll eventually be painting over, there would end up being a hard line between the hand and the drapery, which–you’ll have to take my word for it–would be visually very out of step with the rest of the painting. Consistency, as the smoothie makers of the world will confirm, is a beautiful thing. A sure sign of an amateur realist is inability to regulate the borders of a painting’s various elements. Another sure sign is if exhibitions of their work tend to take place on the doors of their home refrigerators, but that’s just me rambling on without coffee. I apologize.
