Colours Walkthrough

Supplies

So here I have all my paints, my palette, and my handy dandy water bucket. There’s absolutely no chance of drinking out of this thing by accident. I also have a strip of test paper.

Here I’ve laid down a wash of diluted Ultramarine Deep, laid over by some Payne’s Grey. Both of these are Holbein colours. I’m going for a kind of cloudy look here.

     Now I’ve dropped some Dioxazine Violet into the corners. Some salt has been put on for texture.

I’ve started work on the figure, laying in blue shadows using heavily diluted Ultramarine. I also started on the hair, meshing together Dioxazine Violet, Payne’s Grey, and Ultramarine.

Now, after this, I screwed up a bit. I thought a light flesh-tone wash on the figure would look alright. It…didn’t. I had to wet and lift and scrub and lift to get most of the (light!) colour out. This paper doesn’t stand up very well to it, so it started pilling up and tearing the surface. This isn’t the first time paper has done this on me. I waited until it was dry and started in on the figure again, deciding this time to leave her white with just blue shadows. Moral of the story? Just stick to Arches, Jess.

So here’s a detail shot of the finished thing. See what I mean about the pilling? Maybe I’ll redo this one on better paper. You’ll just have to wait and see. I’ll upload a scan of the finished art as soon as it’s done drying and whatnot. Still a bit damp, you see.