PMS
Image by Jennie (c). This is part of my experimentation with color. I couldn’t sleep last night and wanted to loosen up. These new gel pastels are great for loosening up and playing around. Their bright colors mean that I have to be bold and striking – even though it’s uncomfortable. these pastels make me work outside of my comfort zone.

I decided to work on integrating warm and cold into a cohesive figure. it’s really weird but thinking about it was helpful for remembering color theory and concentrating on building colors to represent hues. working entirely without tones in the traditional sense is tricky. The color was the key to this and building the different hues to suggest shape and tone was really interesting. It was looking very disjointed until I started spreading the colors into each other and mixing with abandon. The pubic region has all six colors built in – its a culmination as it were – probably symbolic in many ways. I scattered some middle colors throughout to unify the piece and add complexity to the shadows.

This was just a quick sketch. it is not meant to be particularly good, just an experiment. but I actually like the rounding of forms. I don’t like the shaping of the figure but the actual shapes were secondary to the color experiment. I would like to do a portrait possibly next to explore interesting colors to add expression. I also need to loosen up my portraiture thinking so this should be good. I am embarking on some new medieval portraits soon, I am really looking forward to them.