This painting was inspired my a model by the name of Adriana Kyle. I had fun doing this piece. When I first began this project with a sketch on watercolor paper, I knew that color would follow; much to my surprise, I decided to chronicle each step, in part because I wanted to have something to show for my work, if at some point, I total ruined the piece with my trial and error, so here is how it went :-D
Here is the original sketch which began the process of this particular piece, keep in mind as you watch this, I have very little experience with painting, besides a head that I did a few months ago and one other piece, this is my only experience, and surely my most extensive one.
The blue jean shorts were an experience indeed. Trying to get the correct colors and form was a challenge, especially since they are frayed at the bottom of each leg where they had been cut so very short ;-D
I have colored the eyes blue from some of the remainder from the shorts. Ahhh...the shirt. Now it was a white number with a very fine mesh pattern through which you would have been able to see hints of skin if you where close enough to her. Not knowing how I would pull that piece off, I decided to use white as the base color of the shirt and a very light blue as the detail maker, like the seam and the hints of pattern I tried to display. As I hope I showed, this shirt is also cut off.
As you can see, Lue got me in the middle of the process of making the hair, which had several more transformations to go through before it reached the finished product.
It started with a mixture that was Canary Yellow, Raw Umber and White. Now these water colors are not the type that you get from a little tray, like I had when I was a kid, but rather they come in tubes like oil,or acrylics. I have to watch not using enough water and caking it on the page.
This second stage of the hair I added a bit more White to get a lighter color and added a few highlights and defining lines to the hair.
This first attempt at skin tone was a bit too yellow with not enough red.
I added more Raw Umber and and a bit more white to the mixture to get the more red tint skin.
This picture catches a couple of changes. The first one that I will talk about is the shading color on the skin. I found a place in the paint where the Raw Umber was most evident, giving me the darkest tan color yet, which I then proceed to use to place shadow all over the body and the face. Then, of course, I decided on a light red for the lips, which was a process capturing...I had to go back and cover some of it back up because it looks clownish.
This picture gives a peek of the model from which I worked to get my pose.
The close up shows that I have tried to fix the lips and have put white in the hair and on the face to show where the light would be hitting the model and add a bit more depth and texture to the hair. I also painted her fingernails white.
Now I used some of the brown I had left and painted the wooden hand rail on which she had her hand resting.
I painted some darker pieces on to the wood to give some variation of color like real wood would have.
Here I got stuck on what to do, I didnt want to just leave the paper white behind her; I wanted to make the figure POP. As you can see, I experimented with putting a blue around the whole figure, but when I got to the shorts, C pointed out that it was the same color as the shorts and they were in danger of blending into one another. I decided then to add a plant behind her.
At C's suggestion, I created a tree behind the model, originally, I think the picture had a pool house. I started with a medium green color, going darker and darker with the green. I dont have much of a technique, I just did parenthesis kind of marks all over where I wanted the leaves with different greens. I then created a trunk with some of the browns I had left, two different browns. I also added some white for light effects.
C really wanted to see mountains behind her elbow, so I decided to make some gray, purple and use some white to create simple representations of far away mountains instead of the house.
I decided to make the blue there at her legs into a pool, since one was in the original photograph. I made a deep red to put as tile beside the pool and I also filled in the other two empty spaces near the ground, with a green for grasses.
And last but not least, the light blue sky...all and all I think I got a nice color for the sky. The process of painting this piece took five hours, add in the hour it took to draw the sketch, I have six hours in this piece. I'd have to say that it is well worth the work to produce a piece like this...I quite enjoyed it. Keep a look out for more like it, for believe me, they are on the way.
Marc Kane
Below, you'll find many more sketches for our preview of Not Another Comic Book, due next month. Enjoy!
