[New Painting] - MUSINGS

Hello lovely peeps, 

Here's another small piece I finished yesterday. 

This one is called "Musings", and was another experiment with muted tones, values, and contrast. 

It was inspired by this portrait of Rem Koolhaas, by Stephan Vanfleteren : 

I was always really attracted to the very stark values and the mystery, and the ominous feeling projected by the dark side of the portrait. The texture of the face is also gorgeous, and the subject's stare tells all sorts of stories I felt compelled to explore in a study. 

I purposefully deviated from the likeness of the character in my own painting, as this exercise was not intended as a like-for-like study. 

I stuck to my reference more closely than I usually do, but still tried to modify the person enough that it became a little more my own and was a little less a direct copy of the reference. 

I sadly failed at logging my progress of this painting with process pictures, as I got so absorbed by it that I forgot to takes photos for big portions of time. My apologies for that!

Below are the images I did manage to capture, but I sadly failed to log my favourite step in the painting ; I started out the portrait with washes of grey and black, keeping to the monochromatic theme of the reference. 

But my favourite moment came when I had gotten most of my values and detail down, and then covered the entire piece (apart from the window) with a very light wash of Payne's Grey. (The scan above is closer to the real life colour of the piece than the pictures at the end of this post are)

The addition of the slight colour and shift in hue really added an extra dimension and an extra layer of depth to the previously only black and white portrait, and that was when I really started to enjoy the process. 

I then added the white of the eyes on top of that, and the highlights stood out so beautifully from the now tinted base. It was such a simple yet revelatory step, and it felt so wonderful that I will be exploring that in a few other paintings to see how I can incorporate this technique into future pieces. 

It might sound very trivial and inconsequential from an outside perspective, and I might sound a little silly for being so excited over simply adding white over tinted paper, but sometimes small things that felt simple somehow click beautifully and welcome excitement and passion back into a process that was starting to feel a little stale. 

I think part of my surprise and unexpected enjoyment of this very simple technique comes from the fact that I never loved working on tinted paper when the paper already came that way, because it felt flat. But tinting the paper myself after having laid out my composition in muted layers and having worked out my values already, really made the whole technique more appealing and made it work for me this time. 

I don't know if I am making any sense, this is very stream of consciousness and I am working out my thoughts while I am writing this, so my apologies if I sound a little random. 

Anyway, here are a few in progress pictures. 

I was a little unsure about the smoke towards the end, so I took to Procreate to explore a couple of options. 

As often happens, my first instinct is the one I stuck with. but I was only sure of that decision because I allowed myself to visualise other options and see how they felt. 

That's it for this one!

Working more monochromatically than usual was incredible fun, and will be something I will do more of in the future. I particularly enjoyed incorporating a strong pop of colour with the window. 

Having a window on the human body is a common surrealist theme that I wanted to explore myself for a while, and will probably revisit again in the future. This was a fun introduction to it. :)

I hope you enjoyed this post as well as the painting, and that you are all well. 

My next post will be a Doodle Diary update, since I have been picking up again slowly!

I will see you soon for that one and in the meantime, take good care of yourselves. 

All the best,
M