Started painting the background

So the first thing I did was to go around the edges of the girl with masking fluid then when it had dried I cut out paper to her shape and filled in the middle of her with that....to be honest the paper could of gone horribly, I was just lucky it didn't.
I sprayed water onto the background and started adding the watercolour: sap green, indigo and winsor green. It didn't matter too much what it did as long as there was a general appearance of strips going up and down. You can see in the top left where the paper buckled and the watercolour pooled but in the end the paper dried flat so it's all okay....this is my first time working on stretched paper and I'm rather enjoying it.
After I finished working on the background the bit of paper protecting her was soaked, luckily mostly just with water and very little paint got through but I quickly ditched the paper....for the cling film and indigo layer that would come later I needed something far safer. I ended up replacing it with layers up on layers of cling film which stuck pretty well to the making tape and stopped it from roaming around.

Happy Samhainn/Halloween to you....wish I'd done something for it, ah well. :)

Final drawing

The final drawing on the stretched watercolour paper before I start painting on top. I'm pretty happy with this drawing and there was something very satisfying about having it traced on with crisp lines onto tight perfectly flat stretched paper. Everything felt precise and right....well...apart from that I traced her too far left on the paper and had to shorten the train of her dress to fit it all on....apart from that.

I have to say I really hate fish eye on my camera lenses....I get it for normal photos but it's so annoying when trying to take photos of rectangular pits of paper and then having their straight edges warp. yes I can just stand further back and use my zoom but then I loose some quality and things blur...need to get my tripod whilst I'm at my mums.

I'll edit the pictures in about a week and a half's time but for now you'll just have to survive with the non photoshoped version of things... my mum's laptop only has paint and I don't have access to anything else at hers.

Patterns

Two of the patterns were easy to make and didn't require much contorting to fit in with the way the fabric folded... And then there was this last one. I tried drawing it out, it looked terrible, I could barely get the detail in it clear let alone wrap it around her dress. Since the different hexagonal panels lined up strangely the leaves had to change every time to not overlap with a flower or bird.

This ended up being my solution, to trace it onto my monitor and make it tillable digitally.... It took longer than I'd like to admit but I'm happy with the result and I'll be able to use it again some time.

Original sketch

The original idea for this painting is pretty old... maybe about two years? So this is pretty different from at the start, far more Wulfing than Klimt. I probably should have sketched the original idea down at some point but to be honest I'm happy enough with this idea as well. At least it came out in some form. 

Awhile a go I posted this up on level up (a Facebook art group, pretty good) to get critique on it and I've fixed up the few things that was pointed out there, mostly around the bustle.

I'll admit I've been posting these in a bit of a strange order, I suppose after inspiration and references this should have come next. I'm way ahead of this stage, currently in the middle of painting the final painting, but I didn't want to just start posting about this painting/project half way through..... also I won't be able to work on it for the next ten days so I suppose it's good to have a bit of a buffer. 

I wonder what I'll find to post about when I'm not in the middle of a project.

Colour palette and patten tests

Some more of the tests. I did a lot of tests for this painting. There was a lot of things that could go wrong.

Mostly working out the gold to other colour ratio in my patterns… And how to get the gold to stay on, not get everywhere and have crisp lines. I ended up going with a brass powder/golden calligraphy ink/water mix for the gold, it gave a nice shiny result and anything else I tried came out very cold looking. it also could be pre-mixed when I added it so I didn't have to try and drop brass powder onto PVA and watch it go everywhere.

References: Russian ball gowns & patterns

Technique tests: Cling film, masking fluid & trees

I wanted a dark forest, I didn't want to have to hand paint every tree.
I've not played around with cling film much but I figured this would be a good chance to use it, to get some random patterns in the background that could represent the smaller forest branches. I am however pretty controlling of my art, something that watercolour doesn't like, I want to know exactly what outcome I'll get from a technique so below are my cling film tests, hopefully you can read my hand writing:

The basics of them are the same, put watercolour down and whilst it's still wet put cling film on top, wait for it to dry.
The main things I've learned from this are:
If the paint's too thick it will dry shiny (haven't found an answer to this.)
If I move it about on the paper too much it drags the watercolour around leaving arias bare or too strong which tends to go into the cracks in the pattern, filling them up.
And if I want dark shapes without the arias between them being tainted by the colour too much then I need to make sure the bubbles in the cling film stick out from the paper quite a bit. It doesn't matter how big the bubbles are horizontally (though that will give smaller shapes) but that they stick out vertically.....Not sure if it's caused by vacuum or just having sharper edges.

Inspirations: Sulamith Wülfing & Gustav Klimt

For the painting I'm currently working on I was inspired by Sulamith Wülfing and Gustav Klimt, well not exactly Klimt. I don't actually like that much of Klimt's work, the painting below being one of the few I do:

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I by Gustav Klimt (1907)

 

I love the patterns but there's a muddiness to the skin and it's just so hard to tell what's going on in the painting. I suppose that instead of liking Klimt I like art inspired by him, modern takes on his use of gold and patterns with more contrast.

Well I've got a blog now

The general idea of this blog is to show off all the things I wouldn't otherwise, all the things I wouldn't want to bombard my followers on other sites with.

So to get an idea of what will be on here: I won't be posting memes, selfies, food or cat pictures (unless I took them and they are really well done) but I will be posting colour samples, ideas, musings, inspirations, thoughts on other people's art, references and research, sketches and all the stuff that goes on behind my artwork that would just clutter up other sites, and of course my actual art.
This is the place to see a little bit of my real life and I'll also be posting about any important or relevant events that are going on in it. I aim for everything on here to be at least somewhat interesting.

The goal is to post a little thing every day, nothing big and I won't spend ages editing photos for it.....but just something, little, every day.