Painting class - bowl and drapery.

I'm on a roll, so here is another 'catch-up' blog on a new study. The object of this model was really to pay special attention to the drapery - the bowl being there almost as a supporting article, so therefore the painting of this would be very simplified.

The drawing, as always, is the first thing to attack.   Look at the group globally , that is to say, as a whole and work out the relationships, spaces - both negative and positive, and the context in which the group is placed, then, using charcoal, plot in the basic drawing.

Dust off the charcoal and, using a light colour (yellow ochre, in this instance) and a fine brush, re-draw the whole group. This gives you a chance to correct any errors and also to ensure, in the case of the drapery, that each different turn of the drape is accurately depicted.  It is so easy to assume that a fold is just a gentle curve - study it carefully and you might well see that it is, in fact, made up of a number of small planes almost like facets on a diamond.  Show the different turns of direction as these broken, separate marks will be invaluable when you come to paint.

For this study I again painted the small 'poster' as a way of working out the colours and values (dark and light) before I committed to the painting. The idea is to make small patches of the correct colour/value in their corresponding positions as seen in the model.  Avoid getting too fussy and trying to make the patches resemble the shape of the objects in the model - keep it simple and graphic. In this situation, with a complicated drape, I simply did one patch for the dark value and one for the light in their appropriate relationship, one to the other.  Apologies for the quality of the scan but I think there is enough for you to get the general idea of how to go about this exercise..

With the bit of time left on that first evening I quickly worked on the darkest area to establish the values as shown on the poster, remembering to include the adjacent blue of the backdrop and the brown of the bowl, plus the small section of cast shadow on the wooden board upon which the model is placed.

M.