Week two of lockdown

So much more time to play when in lock down…….After the session with Jac a few weeks ago, discussing how cool colours accentuate warm and vice versa and also Desiderio, the cool ‘incidence of reflection’, warm ‘light mass’, cool‘turning’  and warm/neutral ‘shadows’, I have been experimenting with these ideas on my cups and foot. 

I limited my palette to ivory black and flake white, adding very small amounts of yellow ochre to warm and phthalo blue to cool the greys. I have to say, when I started to lay down the warm pale greys on the cups I was hesitant  as it looked too warm in  contrast to the cooler palette of the under painting (left) but I am rather happy with the way it’s working out (right). Not finished as I would like to cool down the point of turning to accentuate the warmer shadow on the left of the cups.

I used the same palette on the foot as the cup. After a brushing a cool phthalo blue wash over the whole foot I took the grey (left) and literally yelped when I placed it on the canvas. A perfect example of how paint on the palette can look so drastically different on the canvas, the cool toes accentuating the warm base. Believe me, this grey on the palette is the exact same grey on the platform in front of the foot.

For the second half of the week I decided to work on my drawing project. I was reflecting on the fact that most of my drawings/paintings in the past have been reliant on an image or object to work from rather than being able to work from my mind and the fact that when I tried to paint from my mind what I produce is somewhat cliché and rather unconvincing constructed.

If I’m ever going to master figurative drawing and create work that is not reliant on having a person or an image in front of me, I need to go back to anatomy, not in the way I did back in 1986 but with an artistic mind thinking about skeleton, its boney prominences, muscles definition/volume and the relative proportions of the body. 

A good friend of mine, Peter died last year aged 93.  He was an artist and his family, knowing how much we enjoyed spending time together discussing art, his family gave me all his art materials and notes. I found these beautiful drawings he used when thinking about proportion.

I have now spent two solid days with, 'Visible body Muscle Premium' software, Goldfinger, 'Human Anatomy for artists' and BDS notes. I have never studied the face before and cannot believe there are 43 muscles. Needless to say, a lot more than 2 days will be needed.