discussion Kuri, 1/10th bust

[PaulinKendal]

Best bit of freehand painting I've done so far. I used heavy body off-white thinned with white ink for the flowers.

Choosing an organic pattern on folded cloth made it easier than if I'd tried a regular repeating pattern on the orange cloth - fewer places to hide mistakes there, and the eye picks out irregularities in a repeating pattern very quickly.

It's still far from perfect - zoom in and you'll see a fair bit of 'hairiness' to the margins of the flowers, but it's good progress for me.

The purple was painted following the advice of YouTuber Vince Venturella - shaded with, improbably, bright yellow which, mixed with purple produces a brown that's both darker than the purple (go figure, we're mixing pigments, not pure colour) and a brown that responds very sympathetically to washes of blue-black ink and the original purple (a colour that tends to be fairly transparent anyway).

The purple is highlighted with pale flesh, which again works very well indeed. Purple is definitely now in my 'easy' paints to use - unlike orange, which remains a challenge!

 

[Tim Marlow]

Very nice work. Freehand looks excellent…….not my best skill, I’m too impatient. Good work on the purple. That’s colour wheel in action, opposites go well together, and also make more interesting “darks” for shading when mixed.
Orange is hard because it’s transparent. Usually I go with a brown to ivory transition gradient and then tint it with Daler FW ink orange. It’s a high pigment ink, but it’s still transparent……mostly I try to avoid orange all together though :tongue-out3:

 

[PaulinKendal]

Working on her headgear. I think the top section is done, but only just started on the fur trim.

 

[banjer]

This is progressing nicely Paul. Very brave of you to post such unforgivingly large images but you work stands up tp it.

Superb.


Bill

 

[adt70hk]

Paul,

Just had a catch-up! That is coming along beautifully. Keep up the great work.

ATB.

Andrew

 

[Tim Marlow]

Love that yellow tone. Looks just like the colour on my front room walls .

 

[PaulinKendal]

Thanks Bill, Andrew, Tim.

Photos are incredibly unforgiving, it's true, Bill. I feel I'm doing a public service showing this level of detail - I can't be the only person discouraged by the flaws that photos reveal, which are often not really visible in the flesh. I use a big illuminated 2.5x magnifier with a 6x inset, but still miss plenty of stuff until I take a pic and zoom right in.

And often, flaws can be eliminated simply by expending more time, rather than needing a level of skill not available to many of us.

For example, I could spend (even) more time blending the yellowy-orangey-brown of her hat for a smoother finish (I've already spent a lot of time on it), but do I want to? Do I 'need' to?

We are all constantly making judgements like that - is what I've done so far good enough? Photos can really undermine that process.

My approach is to say to myself "Have I got better at this - is this an improvement on what I've done before?"

If the answer's yes, then I might keep going, but I'm content to accept that improving is all I can wish for, as perfection is pretty much unattainable, so for this figure I'm happy to have got a little bit better.

The upside of perfection being unattainable is that we will always have room for improvement - our skills refine, we get better at modelmaking, and that keeps us interested. And that process of improvement, theoretically, need never stop.

 

[PaulinKendal]

To emphasise the point, here's her hat with the fur done. Could I keep going? Of course I could! Do I want or need to - no, I don't think so.

That second picture shows the least attractive angle of this model. Her face is a caricature that works brilliantly from the front, but in profile she looks rather too cartoonish.

And when the photos get me down, I include my thumb as a reminder that no-one else (apart from the sympathetic viewers in this forum) will see the tiny flaws!

 

[PaulinKendal]

This is now finished, see it here.

 

[Steve Brodie]

Wow superb