Marathon Art Day

Well Saturday turned out to be a great day in the art room. And a long one! My intention was to paint the wave on my seascape (having quickly done the sea horizon on Friday). This took quite a bit of kicking myself to do. I was quite pleased with how the painting looked up to this point and was quite sure adding the wave would be a disaster!

To avoid the inevitable I unpacked the bag of goodies my mum gave me. Some years ago she had bought an acrylics set and canvases that she never used, and she gave the lot to me! In addition she gave me some old acrylic tubes and a collection of old brushes, all sorts and sizes. Brilliant!

Finally out of excuses I started my painting. As I mentioned before I had not worked through the book using acrylics and was very much winging this bit. And again, colour mixing was a best endeavour due to my limited pallet range. Still, the wave appeared and was not a disaster. I cannot say the same for the foam I painted under it, but overall I was quite pleased. Especially with the sea spray bit. That was quite fun.

When I finished I still had the art itch and picked up my maiden from Friday to keep working. I ended up finishing her and was absolutely delighted with how she turned out. My initial intention was to use white to highlight her but once I'd blended the yellow in I loved the subtle warm tones. Quite a departure from the usual bright colours I love. In the picture the model had short hair. This meant I not only had to work out how to represent her curls, but also how they would appear if very long. I did some practise on a scrap of paper and eventually had to just go for it. I love the end result. I could have given her the more usual shaggy curls, but these thick rolls look so much better.

The effort put in to getting her hands right was worth it. It can be tempting when dealing with long hair to allow it to drape over any sections that may be tricky to do. The shape and tone of this model's body was too lovely to cover up and I didn't want to waste any of it. Working on a larger scale also made it easier to work in detail that would otherwise be sacrificed on a smaller scale.

While I don't want to commit to doing a work like this every week and would miss my more free, relaxed maiden sketches, setting up another one of this detail and dipping in and out of it would be an idea.