Leaping Silhouette

I still haven’t gone back to my nude.  As much as I really want to finish him I keep putting other paintings ahead of it.  The fact that it’s so close to being done scares me a little bit.  What if I sit down to finish it and completely F it up?!  The thought makes me feel slightly ill.  No wonder Van Gogh went crazy.  Lol!  So, for now it sits on my shelf so that I can look at it and build up the confidence to get back to it. 

In the mean time I’ve completed another painting.  This one is another figure painting but with brighter colours; I needed a changed from the grey scale of the nude. Using my Anatomy for the Artist book as a reference I decided to make my figure more of a silhouette than a detailed individual.

Getting the basic silhouette painted was relatively easy.  However, when it came time to add the bit of highlighting I wanted, well that took more tries and more time than I would have thought.  In the end I realized that less highlighting is more for this particular piece. 

The bold yellow, orange & reds were the fun part.  Again it took me a bit to figure out the best technique for what I was trying to achieve, but I got there (mostly).  With each painting I learn something new, what works and what doesn’t, what I’m good at and what I need to work on (quite a bit).  It’s a fun learning process and each painting leads me somewhere different.