Sisters: Step 6
I briefly mentioned during the commentary on By the Fountain that I had used a somewhat new technique to paint the dress in that painting. It basically consisted of using thick, un-diluted color and a small round brush to paint the dress in one pass. I was so pleased with the results that I decided to try the same thing here. However, as I suspected, the technique didn’t translate well to the much larger scale of this piece. The dress in this painting is almost as large as the entire By the Fountain canvas. What did end up working, with very similar results, was a hybrid of my usual technique of blending the darkest shadows and brightest highlights into a blocked in mid-tone layer, and this newer one-pass technique.
I blocked in the mid-tones with a relatively large brush as usual, although with a little more precision. I used as close to finished colors as possible, especially in those areas that were the brightest. I applied a thicker layer of paint than I normally would have, and used the small round brush to do the fine blending. Then I used the small brush and straight titanium white to blend in the more subtle details in the fabric and fine tune the colors as well as lay down the areas of pure white highlights. In the shadow areas I used the older technique exactly. The end result was a surface finish that had the same quality I liked so much from the other painting. The only drawback to the technique is that it requires the area being worked on to be completed in one sitting. I worked around that with the dress by breaking it up into several large sections. I was also able, because of the colors involved, to work with the paint for a long time before it began to tack up. It will be interesting to see how well I will be able to adapt the same basic idea to the shirt of the other figure, which will contain much more rapidly drying earth-tone pigments.
