Winter Evening: Step 17
The last few days I have been doing a little work on the chair. Originally, I had a subtle Victorian print, cloth upholstery in mind, but as the rest of the room neared completion, I started thinking about leather. I was worried that with the texture of the stone and the wood grain in the floor, the fancy fabric might be a bit too busy. Also, the simple luxury of the leather seemed a bit more in line with the style of the room. I started with a few pictures of different leathers, but as I got into the process, I found that it was really pretty easy to convert the cloth chair into leather. The biggest difference is the high level of reflection on the leather’s surface. With a little experimentation I found that simple enough depict. The tricky bit was the squished bit of cushion under the figure’s knees. The wrinkles created in the cloth cushion the model was sitting in the reference photo didn’t look right in the leather cushion. I found some examples of leather wrinkles, and tried to use them to work out the difference. It took a bit of work, but in the end it worked out.
In the digital photo you are seeing, the chair appears to have a much higher level of contrast than the foreground stonework etc. This is due mostly to the freshness of the paint on the chair. One of the main colors used in both the stone and the chair is ivory black, which tends to dull quite a bit on drying. When the piece is finished, a rich oil layer over the darker colors, and eventually the varnish will restore all of the blacks to their blackest, and even out the contrast in the entire piece. The varnish will also even out some of the distracting effects of the light reflecting differently off brush strokes in the walls etc.
