This Thursday we are going to paint our life model in one pose rather than doing several. That means we can paint a bit bigger to build up our paint layers that will give us some interesting visual texture, as in this Frank Aurbach painting.
The richness of the painted surface is often the result of lots of modifications and corrections of hue and value while we try to establish the form. Many great masterworks were modified many times but only reveal the final version.
Please bring a flat palette to work on, which could be a plate o piece of plastic, large enough to give you a wide mixing area. After marking out our composition and doing some rough measuring we will spend the first segment working the figure/background relationship so that we get a good sense of how our figure sits/stands in the space around him.
Then we'll have to be brave to sculpt the form into 2 or 3 values that will reveal the form. This is a nice example from Konstantin Yuon
And finally we'll see how far we can stretch our colours to include some visual mixing of tones. Although this is a pastel you can see how Toulouse-Lautrec pushed the range of his warm and cool hues.
We'll be practicing techniques to maintain our visual attention on the model and also how to switch from blocking to line drawing in order to increase the speed and efficiency of our work.
This is the last in our life model series for this block, although please remember that we have one more class on the 28th of July. The autumn painting course begins on Thursday 6th of October for 10 weeks and bookings will be available on the COAS website soon.
Thursday promises to be ideal painting weather btw!