Thursday 14 November 2013

Poppy

This weeks AVA group subject was 'Hats, Bags, Shoes'. As we have had this subject on the programme for several seasons, I have exhausted my supply of paintable objects as a still life study, so I decided to try something new.
I liked the idea of painting a person in a hat, but was quite anxious about the face as I do so little of that subject. So I chose to paint the young lady facing away from me, holding her hat against a light breeze maybe and looking out across a landscape.
To make the painting more interesting, I added a large poppy to the hat brim and I made the fields into poppy fields. I thought these two elements nicely linked into the red nail polish.

I did quite a careful drawing as I did not want the hands to look like bunches of bananas, which is so easy to do.
I masked out the stamen area of the poppy on the hat, but that is about all the preparation I did.

I painted all the elements in a traditional watercolour manner, adding a bit of splatter to the poppy fields to hopefully help the illusion along.
At the end I also added some browns to her hair as I realised that my mixture of Anthraquinachridone Blue and Burnt Umber was a little to uniformly 'black'.

For someone who rarely paints figures, I am quite pleased with the result!


'Poppy'
Watercolour on Fabriano Artistico Extra White
300g  cold pressed paper

10 comments:

  1. Very striking with great colours;

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  2. Thanks Peter. It didn't turn out too bad, did it!

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  3. Thanks, Larry, for the lovely comment. Glad you enjoyed the post.

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  4. You should be pleased with this it is quite lovely

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  5. Thanks Polly. Its lovely to know that you enjoy the posts, Thank you for looking.

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  6. Wonderful job! i love the background and the scene.. hugs!

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  7. Lovely comment, Thank you Mari Jose. Hope you continue to enjoy the posts.

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  8. Very cleverly done! A beautiful image!

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  9. Thank you Sean. Glad you like it.

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