Penny part two

In the first warm up I didn't know what I was doing. I had produced some satisfying drawings the week before but it was as if I couldn't remember how I did it.On the first one I ended up drawing back into the colours with black chalk. Some people liked it but I didn't. I decided to do the next one without colour, a combination of black chalk and charcoal. It's different to Brockweir where we are further back, here we very close which leads to inevitable cropping. The third drawing felt more like last week as I became looser and started to attack it more.


The afternoon session was much better. Penny got into some great poses and I carried on where I had left off applying the chalks more freely. I was using the lighter brighter colours and using both the point and the flat side of the chalk. I also tend to use my little finger to knock back some of the marks. By the end I was loving it.

The first image in this sequence shows the painting as it was at the end of last week, the second one after an hour and the third at completion. The radical change in colour is due to different lighting conditions. I struggled at first knowing quite what I was doing. The idea last week was to try to approach the painting like I do my warm up drawings. Alex wanted me to apply the colours in strokes and not get too fussy and tight as I usually do. He wanted me to be bolder with the colour like I am with my pastels, ' a leap of faith' as he called it. In explaining what he meant he likened the approach to the method of the Post impressionist painter Seurat whereby colours mix optically and the painting works when viewed from a distance. It was difficult to stand back and assess things as I was hemmed in where I was positioned. When I did manage to take a look at it from a distance it looked awful . I reverted to painting in the style I had been using recently and found it helped if I stood further back holding the brush at arms length. I added a dark background by mixing alizarin, cadmium yellow and ultramarine on the canvas and it helped.I had added vermilion and cobalt blue to my palette but as the afternoon session progressed I felt the colours were becoming muddy. The face was wrong and needed redrawing which was difficult as Penny had moved. It was worth approaching the painting in the way I did as I think it is the way forward and I will try it again at Brockweir tomorrow