Blodeuwedd WIP

Blodeuwedd was actually a strange painting for me, both in art style and in how I worked on it. I'll mostly near complete one area before moving onto another. For Blodeuwedd I slowly built up multiple areas at once.

There's some good in doing it like this: Firstly it means one area can dry whilst I work on another, useful for such a large painting. I get an idea of how the overall colour scheme sits quicker and can adjust things in the early stages. Also I am less likely to overwork areas that don't need it.

However.....having your entire painting spending most of the time looking bad can be pretty disheartening. I was already pushing how interested I was in painting her due to doing so many tests for her before hand, adding in the extra time of waiting for her to look good didn't help.

I think in the end I'd probably be best of mixing the two methods, get the important bits like the face near complete and then I can start working on multiple areas at once.

Also working on multiple areas means it's harder to talk about my progress with each picture, you'll probably not notice the slight colour shifts things go through and it's really not worth mentioning on it's own.

Masking out the embroidery on her dress. For the bottom of it I used purple lake, shadow and payne's grey, with a lot of granulation fluid. Her original dress design was very princess-y and I wanted to stain it up a bit.

At this point her skin looks really weird, very much a case of it needing context to sit well though I do tone down the colour later. I think it'll take a while for me to decide if I want to do my painting's skin first because it's important and easy to mess up a face or closer to the end so I can compare it to it's surroundings. Hair first then skin?

Throwing down the first layers on the Hawthorn, Pea and Burdock flowers.

Her skin looks better now with the hair to give context. I left the hair around her face separate since I knew the method I used for her hair would bleed into places I didn't want it to even with the masking fluid and cling film. I couldn't risk that on her face.

Base of her mask, darkening some areas of her hair and bottom of her dress, putting in the yellows of the Primrose, Meadowsweet and building up the other flowers.

Darkening her hair even more and letting the Oak leaves stand out better.

Her mask is based off a Tawny Owl which actually have dark brown eyes, however I wasn't happy with how little of her was owl-like So I decided to give her the bright yellow other owls can have, a little more to make her less human...I'm not very fond of painting humans.

The mask was built up with either thick round strokes or long thin ones depending on the feather type on that part of the owl. One benefit to using naples yellow and white gouache on it is it's opacity, otherwise I wouldn't have been able lay the pale feathers over the dark ones.

Putting in the green silk of her dress, I'm happy with the effect but it's too clean for her, I later stain and darken it.

Also doing a lot of final details on her mask and flowers, mostly pushing the shadows and highlights with white gouache.

The step before I finish it, I'll post up the complete painting later. Once I fight with my scanner.

Her eyes are still not finished, I don't know why I keep leaving the face and eyes to the end....if they go wrong it could ruin a painting but they're scary to do at the start.

Painted in the embroidery and jewellery, it was too bright in comparison to the rest so I had to calm it down, I'm not too happy with the result but I'm not too sure what else I could have done.

I also generally added more roundness to her body, she was looking very 2D.

Added in the...antenna? of the Hawthorn, the Broom flowers and made the Meadowsweet more hazy, adding dots of white gouache and naples yellow as well as breaking up the shapes a bit.

Then added some mistiness (hair?) in front of her as well, just to balance out the painting a bit and make it seem like more of a background as well. I ended up using doll hair just to give a bit of texture, it was hard to control when there was already painted in areas around it that I couldn't just mask off.