19/01/2020
Now we’re far enough into the New Year I’ve been thinking a lot about my art journey over the last couple of years, about style and about process. And, as my technique evolves, I thought I’d share some artwork breakdowns. As I’ve said before, I know a lot of artists begin with a pencil sketch but I go right in with paint and colour from the off!
1. Lay out the basic shapes and get a little texture in early. I often add a few jagged brushstrokes, some splatter or rough lines to ground the image. Don’t worry if colours are muddy at this stage but try to establish the palette.
2. Begin to map facial features. I try and get these pretty definite at this stage as, if it doesn’t look like your subject now, it’s going to be a lot harder to fix later on.
3. Start the difficult task of marrying your colours, particularly the skin tone. I don’t mean blending here but rather overlaying similar colours in your palette to create a smoother finish. I usually throw in some brighter ‘glazes’ here to add interest and sometimes to tie the piece to the background colour. That can be really helpful so background and subject don’t feel completely detached.
4. The final touches. Deciding which bits stay loose and which get refined depends more on my intuition than anything else but generally hair, eyelashes and mouth get crisper, I keep refining the skin and sometimes even colour correct slightly to pull the shadows or highlights into a different colour space.
And there you have it. Hope it’s interesting to see behind the scenes!
@ Abel Tasman National Park
