It took a few days, but once the value foundation and the colour foundation were done, I could start to enjoy finishing the painting. Ironically, it is always some aspect of the original image which had originally drawn me to it which turns out to be a challenge to paint! This time, for example, the diagonal slant of the sun had set up a lovely contrast between the skin tones in full light and those in shadow, but both sides have to look believable, part of the same colour continuum yet at very different values. So I have fooled around with the tones, reminding myself that skin is translucent and that blood, both red and blue, shows, and mumbling to myself, "How did Rubens do it???" No answer is forthcoming.
I have been mentally compiling a list of the artists I most admire for their handling of skin tones. Will publish it when I have ten minutes. That may be a while: every day I am out in the garden pulling the root shoots from two large black locust trees which failed last year and had to be removed; they are not going gently into that good night. I must have pulled close to a thousand foot-high volunteers by now. The alternative is to live in a dense forest full of thorns in a few years.
I must go now to bathe my wounds and then back to the easel for finishing touches. I am trying to post here twice a week, assuming I can stem the black locust blood-letting. (Reminds me of the time many years ago when I fell into a very tall lilac hedge which I was trimming from a stepladder; that experience taught me never to wear a bikini when combatting nature.)
I have been mentally compiling a list of the artists I most admire for their handling of skin tones. Will publish it when I have ten minutes. That may be a while: every day I am out in the garden pulling the root shoots from two large black locust trees which failed last year and had to be removed; they are not going gently into that good night. I must have pulled close to a thousand foot-high volunteers by now. The alternative is to live in a dense forest full of thorns in a few years.
I must go now to bathe my wounds and then back to the easel for finishing touches. I am trying to post here twice a week, assuming I can stem the black locust blood-letting. (Reminds me of the time many years ago when I fell into a very tall lilac hedge which I was trimming from a stepladder; that experience taught me never to wear a bikini when combatting nature.)
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