New Beginnings

This month starts the first month ever in my entire adult life where I no longer work for the youth Service, you'd think having worked nearly 3 decades for them they'd let me with just a months notice - only they didn't i had to work 3. now that it is over I'm concentrating on my summer programme, where i will be teaching drawing, watercolours and oils.I may also start up another private class in the evening in my local town.
So now i have more time to work on my own work where shall i start?????????
I wrote myself a list at the beginning of the year of all the things I wanted to paint, then I kept adding to that to that list and now it's got over a hundred items on it!
I want to continue with my fairies and angels and dragons and insects and write a small book on skin tone and .......................... I've exhausted myself just looking at the list. Oh and then there's the list of creatures that my client gave me to see what I could come up with.
So what did I decide on? doing my usual combination trick, if i cant do all the list then I find ways to combine different elements, which lead me to this -

 

 The drawings from my sketch book, this is not as planned out as it first looks ( I should have done a tonal sketch to see how the light would fall.  Moral of story don't take short cuts - you'll see why in another blog.

The drawing below is also from the same series, yup it turned into a series of drawings overnight. The series  title of is "Stealing the wings of Butterflies" all will become apparent as we go with the paintings.

The first colour washes for the background completed - yes they are floating leaves in the sky, I also limited the palette here to just a few colours such as lemon yellow titanium white, sap green and green gold. Being a bit eager I rushed the drawing copying from my sketch book and not making many adjustments.

I wash on base tones for the skin in burnt sienna and white. this just lets me play with the sculpting part of the body before rendering the skin properly. 

As you can see the tummy going well!!!  and I've started to base coat other areas such as the trousers, shirt and boots. What I haven't told you is the canvas is 100 x 50 cm and is over half my height, remember what I said about not cutting corners! well if you look carefully you'll see that the legs aren't long enough because I didn't spend the extra time i normally would checking these things. Drawing below your waistline is not conducive to great proportions- let that be a lesson to you!!

I had to repaint all of the lower half  to correct my mistake!

I'll show you rest on the next blog.