Painting Skin Tones/Finished Raven, Quail and Moose

Hello students,

Today’s lesson will be particularly interesting to those of you that like to paint people. Creating good skin tones requires some tricks.

The first few washes on the fairy's face, set the color scheme.

Once again we are dealing with art as an illusion of reality. There is really no fairy here. It is just paper and paint. But in the end we will fool the viewer into thinking that they are seeing into another world. In order to create shapes that have depth, I would like to introduce you to the use of opposite colors.

Orange and blue are opposites and create tension within the wash.I start by creating enough paint on my glass palette to last for the entire body of the fairy.

 I first place clear water in the chosen open spaces and then put orange brown on the top, and blue in the area where the shadow would be. Each wash, when properly placed, creates the illusion of skin.

When your washes are interesting shapes unto themselves, it’s a bit like having good ingredients in a recipe. The more each shape stands alone as an art form, the more the entire painting will be perceived as beautiful by the viewer in the end.  Working on people/fairies is the most difficult and time consuming of my painting.

 

I used to be afraid of painting people, because I was known as an animal artist and that was my comfortable genre.  Then one of my customers said, “Stop thinking of it as difficult Jody and just remember people are kind of an animal too.”  With this in mind, I tackled this difficult subject.

You can paint anything if you believe you can.

 

Below you will find my finished moose, quail and a photograph of me with my ravens.

Heart To Heart

Quail Sanctuary...Does anyone have a better title idea than this?

Jody with her birds.

I took this picture of myself today with my Iphone of the quail and ravens. I would love to hear from you if someone thinks of a good title for either of these pictures. If we pick your title, I’ll send you a print!

If you would like to see any of these paintings in person, remember they will be on display at my show next Friday and Saturday (October 24th and 25th). I’m hoping some of you can come!

Happy painting,

Jody

~ by jodybergsma on October 15, 2008.